"They’re not going to do all the tasks we do": Understanding trust and reassurance towards a UV-C disinfection robot

Galvez Trigo, Maria Jose ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6492-0955, Reyes-Cruz, Gisela, Maior, Horia A., Pepper, Cecily, Price, Dominic, Leonard, Pauline, Tochia, Chira, Hyde, Richard, Watson, Nicholas and Fischer, Joel E. 2023. "They’re not going to do all the tasks we do": Understanding trust and reassurance towards a UV-C disinfection robot. Presented at: 32nd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, IEEE RO-MAN 2023, Busan, South Korea, 28-31 August 2023. 2023 32nd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN). IEEE, pp. 2140-2147. 10.1109/ro-man57019.2023.10309364

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Abstract

Increasingly, robots are adopted for routine tasks such as cleaning and disinfection of public spaces, raising questions about attitudes and trust of professional cleaners who might in future have robots as teammates, and whether the general public feels reassured that disinfection is carried out by robots. In this paper, we present the results of a mixed- methods user study exploring how trust and reassurance by both professional cleaners and members of the public is affected by the use of a UV-C robot and information about its performance disinfecting a simulated classroom. The results show a range of insights for those designing and wishing to deploy UV-C robots: we found that trust and reassurance is affected by information about the UV-C robots’ task performance, with more information coinciding with significantly more agreement to be able to judge that the robot is doing a good job, although care should be taken when designing information about task performance to avoid misinterpretation. Overall, the results suggest a generally positive picture regarding the use of UV- C disinfecting robots and that cleaning professionals would be happy to have them as their teammates; however, there were also some concerns regarding the effect on less-skilled jobs. Taken together, our results provide considerations to make UV- C robots welcomed by cleaning teams as well as to provide reassurance to space users.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	Published
Schools:	Computer Science & Informatics
Subjects:	T Technology > T Technology (General)
Publisher:	IEEE
ISBN:	979-8-3503-3670-2
Funders:	UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Hub EP/V00784X/1, Horizon: Trusted Data-Driven Products EP/T022493/1
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	13 June 2023
Date of Acceptance:	2 June 2023
Last Modified:	20 Feb 2024 10:59
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/160140

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