Self-driving vehicles, small robots on production lines, drones flying rescue missions, even robots that keep older people company: these are some of the proposed, not-so futuristic, ways robots will aid us. But all those scenarios won't be possible without trust. Humans need to feel secure enough around robots and robotic systems to rely on them. "Building human-robot trust into autonomous robotic systems like self-driving vehicles is key to the systems' success," said Ryan Williams, a Virginia Tech assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. "As we readily observe in human teams, collaboration without trust is often ineffective or even counterproductive," he said.

Jack Weast, vice president of autonomous vehicle standards at Intel Corp's Mobileye, in an interview on Friday said the auto industry was assembling a vast list of likely road scenarios and human behavior that every driverless car should be able to navigate safely. Government agencies and insurance companies are part of that process, Weast said.

Robocars will not be accident-free. For regulators who harbor hopes of fostering a future of autonomous vehicles (AVs), this is a political reality that's likely to haunt them. For the public, it's a psychologically untenable prospect, especially if a robocar happens to flatten a loved one. From a technological standpoint, though, this inevitability is the starting point for engineers who want to develop safer AVs. "The safest human driver in the world is the one who never drives," said Jack Weast, Intel's senior principal engineer and Mobileye's vice president for autonomous vehicle standards.

Intel is pushing for Responsibility-Sensitive Safety (RSS), a mathematical model for autonomous-vehicle safety conceived by Mobileye (now an Intel company), to become an IEEE standard. The company is spearheading a new working group, IEEE P2846, to pursue "A Formal Model for Safety Considerations in Automated Vehicle Decision Making." The group's first meeting is scheduled for late January in San Jose, Calif. More specifically, the working group seeks to enable industry and government to "align on a common definition of what it means for an automated vehicle to drive safely balancing safety and practicability." Intel sees the initiative as a way to encourage autonomous-vehicle industry to ask -- and grapple with answering -- the hardest question of all in the AV era: How safe is safe enough?

It's natural to fear what you don't understand. For example, according to a AAA study, 78 percent of drivers are afraid to ride in a self-driving car. It's tough to give up control of a few tons of metal flying down the road at 70 miles per hour and feel safe. Intel decided to investigate this fear, and ultimately see if it can solve our autonomous-anxiety problem. The company recently conducted a study to see if people who have never ridden in an autonomous car change their mind after experiencing it first-hand. The test was simple: Anxious passengers went for a quick spin in the backseat of the automobile around a closed track with nothing but a robot car for company.

I took my first ride in a self-driving car yesterday. It was during the grand opening of Intel's Advanced Vehicle Lab in San Jose, Calif. Automotive supplier Delphi used some Intel electronics and other tech to retrofit an Audi SUV into an autonomous vehicle. I piled into the back with a couple of other journalists and we took a two-mile drive through real Silicon Valley traffic. We had a safety driver who could take over the car in case of emergency.