Investigating Human Trust and Confidence in Robot-Assisted Recycling Tasks

The presence of robots in everyday settings is growing rapidly. As they become increasingly common in service-oriented roles, such as in restaurants, retail, and reception, their primary function often involves assisting people by providing guidance and supporting decision-making. In these contexts, a critical factor influencing their effectiveness is the level of human trust in the robot’s actions. In this work, we investigate human trust, confidence and perceptions in interactions with robots within the context of a recycling task. We developed a robot equipped with a vision-enabled LLM to classify trash items and a robotic arm to indicate the recommended bin-either recycling or general waste. In a sorting experiment involving 12 participants, each completed the task under three conditions: (C1) without any assistance, (C2) with an instructional sheet, and (C3) with the option to request assistance from the robot. We tracked whether participants chose to consult the robot and collected self-reported confidence ratings for each condition. Preliminary results suggest that participants are more likely to trust the robot’s guidance and report higher confidence in correctly completing the task when assisted by the robot compared to performing the task alone or with only the instructional sheet.