Trust includes attitudes and expectations that influence whether and how a person relies on a robot. Reliance is observable behavior, but it is not identical to trust.
Trust determines whether a user will delegate a task to a robot. It dictates whether they will work alongside it without obsessively monitoring it. Trust determines whether your robot gets used as intended, worked around, or abandoned after a single error.
This distinction matters because designers can measure both reported trust and reliance behavior, then ask whether either is appropriately calibrated to the robot's actual capability.
Trust is shaped by robot performance and attributes, the person, the task, and the environment. Communication is important, but it cannot compensate for poor reliability or unsafe engineering.
FIGURE 5.1: The three pillars of HRI trust. Each is a design responsibility, not a byproduct of good engineering.
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