MORE | Spring 2021

Evaluating How Empathy Optimizes Transparency and Trust in pHRI

This research investigates how a robot’s empathy, the ability to allow humans to misunderstand a robot’s intent, optimizes the transparency and trust in the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). The robot is first integrated with intent inference and motion planning to think and act like a human in a collaboration scenario. Then, an empathetic intent inference algorithm is further incorporated into the robot. Both models are tested in a pick-and-place experiment with humans to see how empathy makes the collaboration more transparent and trustworthy. The result is expected to reveal the significance of empathy in robots with more tolerance to human misunderstanding in HRI.