Modeling and Predicting Trust Dynamics in Human-Robot Teaming: A Bayesian Inference Approach

Trust in automation, or more recently trust in autonomy, has received extensive research attention in the past two decades. The majority of prior literature adopted a "snapshot" view of trust and typically evaluated trust through questionnaires administered at the end of an experiment. This "snapshot" view, however, does not acknowledge that trust is a time-variant variable that can strengthen or decay over time. To fill the research gap, the present study aims to model trust dynamics when a human interacts with a robotic agent over time. The underlying premise of the study is that by interacting with a robotic agent and observing its performance over time, a rational human agent will update his/her trust in the robotic agent accordingly. Based on this premise, we develop a personalized trust prediction model based on Beta distribution and learn its parameters using Bayesian inference. Our proposed model adheres to three major properties of trust dynamics reported in prior empirical studies. We tested the proposed method using an existing dataset involving 39 human participants interacting with four drones in a simulated surveillance mission. The proposed method obtained a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 0.072, significantly outperforming existing prediction methods. Moreover, we identified three distinctive types of trust dynamics, the Bayesian decision maker, the oscillator, and the disbeliever, respectively. This prediction model can be used for the design of individualized and adaptive technologies.