Would a robot trust you? Developmental robotics model of trust and theory of mind

The technological revolution taking place in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence seems to indicate a future shift in our human-centred social paradigm towards a greater inclusion of artificial cognitive agents in our everyday environments. This means that collaborative scenarios between humans and robots will become more frequent and will have a deeper impact on everyday life. In this setting, research regarding trust in human–robot interactions (HRI) assumes a major importance in order to ensure the highest quality of the interaction itself, as trust directly affects the willingness of people to accept information produced by a robot and to cooperate with it. Many studies have already explored trust that humans give to robots and how this can be enhanced by tuning both the design and the behaviour of the machine, but not so much research has focused on the opposite scenario, that is the trust that artificial agents can assign to people. Despite this, the latter is a critical factor in joint tasks where humans and robots depend on each other's effort to achieve a shared goal: whereas a robot can fail, so can a person. For an artificial agent to know when to trust or distrust somebody and adapt its plans to this prediction can make all the difference in the success or failure of the task. Our work is centred on the design and development of an artificial cognitive architecture for a humanoid autonomous robot that incorporates trust, theory of mind (ToM) and episodic memory, as we believe these are the three key factors for the purpose of estimating the trustworthiness of others. We have tested our architecture on an established developmental psychology experiment [1] and the results we obtained confirm that our approach successfully models trust mechanisms and dynamics in cognitive robots. Trust is a fundamental, unavoidable component of social interactions that can be defined as the willingness of a party (the trustor) to rely on the actions of another party (the trustee), with the former having no control over the latter [2].