“Please Press Floor B”: Engendering Trust in a Guide Robot

For assistive robots (in roles such as carers, guides, companions, and assistants) to be most effective, they will need to engender trust in their users. The ROBO-GUIDE (ROBOtic GUidance and Interaction DEvelopment) project is an interdisciplinary project bringing together engineers and scientists working in computational neuroscience, control systems, formal verification, natural language, and psychology, to address how such a system can be designed. This paper outlines our approach, which focuses on the key trust influencers: safety, verification, communication, and behaviour.