Active Trust Management for Successful Human-Robot Teaming: Moving from a Trust Repair to a Trust Satisficing Perspective
Authors: Nicola Webb, Edmund R. Hunt
Organizations: School of Engineering Mathematics & Technology, University of Bristol
Abstract
Integrating mobile robots into human teams promises significant capability improvements for tasks such as searching hazardous environments. Unlike existing teleoperated robots, future robot systems will increasingly be endowed with some level of artificial intelligence (AI), giving them a degree of autonomy in how they pursue mission goals. This autonomy could make a human-agent (robot) team more effective but also put inter-agent trust under strain if robots make a mistake, or (appear to) pursue task priorities that conflict with the team's best interest. During a mission, agents' trust states are anticipated to vary according to the situation as understood by each teammate (trustor). If component-level (agent) or system-level trust falls below sufficient levels for cooperative tasks to be completed, it could critically affect mission success . We argue that active trust management will be an important precondition for the success of human-robot teams (HRTs, a subcategory of human-agent teams with embodied agents), especially in dynamic, high-risk environments. We present a trust satisficing perspective which acknowledges and attempts to account for the fluctuating, multi-faceted, and context-dependent nature of trust and trust requirements even under normal operating conditions. Our outline of a trust management framework for human-robot teaming includes online measurement of proxy metrics for trust, closed-loop adaptation of robot behavior, and variable autonomy to give space for human responsibility in situations requiring value judgements. We refer to a recent experimental exploration of 'swift trust' and a novel behavioral trust metric for HRT, and we highlight issues for further investigation.
Repeated human-robot interaction (HRI) requires proactively accounting for humans who continually adapt to evolving beliefs about the robot. Prior frameworks often treat encounters as isolated events, suffering cumulative task performance decay as human perception drifts, or maintain long-term influence through erratic, unpredictable behavior that erodes perceived human trust and relies on computationally unscalable formulations. To address these gaps, we introduce the Belief- Aware Influence and Trust (BAIT) controller. BAIT integrates a hierarchical particle filter, which infers both fast human strategic shifts and slow perceptual belief updates, with a belief-aware Model Predictive Path Integral planner. BAIT explicitly optimizes the trade-off between long-horizon influence and human trust, while enforcing immediate task performance as a strict constraint. Across simulations, a human-subject study, and a real-world GEM vehicle deployments in repeated lane-merging scenarios, BAIT achieves task performance comparable to baselines that optimize long-term influence through unpredictability while yielding significantly higher user trust. The video demonstrating our experiments is available at https://youtu.be/9o4GqKLWDCw.
As language-model agents increasingly work in teams, each agent must decide how much to trust its teammates. Yet we lack a standard way to measure trust between AI agents. We propose a behavioral measure based on costly verification. In a cooperative survival game, checking a teammate's work consumes resources, while trusting a wrong answer can be fatal. Relative to a memoryless version of the same model, reduced verification provides an observable measure of trust. Using this framework, we study trust formation, breakage, and recovery across six frontier model snapshots. When paired with a consistently reliable teammate, four snapshots (Claude Opus 4.6, Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5.1, and Gemini 3.1 Pro) reduce verification by roughly 60-85%, whereas two smaller snapshots show little or no such adjustment. Failures reverse this discount, but models differ in how they respond. Some concentrate renewed scrutiny on the culprit, while others become more cautious toward the entire team. Recovery is slower than formation, and clustered failures sustain suspicion far longer than the same number of failures spread apart. These differences have practical consequences. Models that form trust verify less, decide more quickly, and achieve higher payoffs in our environment. By contrast, persistent over-verification is associated with indecision rather than safety. Our results show that trust dispositions can be measured before deployment and suggest that calibration, rather than maximal suspicion, should be the central concern in the governance of multi-agent AI systems.
AI systems are fallible, and humans can make mistakes in deciding whether to trust AI over their own judgment. Thus, improving human-AI collaboration requires understanding when, why, and how humans decide to rely on AI. We study two distinct reliance decisions: the delegation choice -- deciding when to let AI act autonomously without knowing its output, and the adoption choice -- evaluating AI suggestions and deciding how to use them. Both of these decoupled reliance patterns shape collaboration, but prior work rarely studies them together in realistic settings with the same users. We address this gap by studying collaborative human--AI teams competing in a question-answering game in which humans can choose when and how to work with AI agents to win. Our 24 matches pair 23 expert humans with 16 AI agents, capturing 387 delegation and 1440 adoption decisions. While human--AI collaboration performs better than either AI or humans alone, humans make suboptimal collaboration decisions, both under-relying on correct AI suggestions (3.9% of opportunities missed) and over-relying when AI misleads them (1.7%). Both parties contribute wrong answers: reported model confidence is near chance when humans and AI disagree, while confirmation bias drives higher under-reliance (64.5%) when an AI suggestion agrees with humans' initial incorrect answer. To close this gap, we recommend calibrated confidence, evidence-grounded explanations, and mechanisms that help users refine trust.