Modeling Trust and Empathy for Socially Interactive Robots

This chapter examines how notions of trust and empathy can be applied to human–robot interaction and how it can be used to create the next generation of emphatic agents, which address some of the pressing issues in multicultural aging societies: to harness cutting-edge AI research to develop solutions and new services. First, some examples of possible future services are given. Then it is discussed how existing descriptive models of trust can be operationalized to allow robot agents to elicit trust in the human partners and how the robot agents can detect and alter trust levels to have transparency to be included in the design of interaction. Next, with regard to future computational models of empathy, fundamental challenges are formulated, and psychological models of empathy are discussed for their appliance in computational models and their use of interactive empathic agents. For trust and empathy, a research agenda for the next steps is sketched, including an overview of suitable evaluation methods. The chapter finally concludes with a set of research questions raised.