”They’re not going to do all the tasks we do”: understanding trust and reassurance towards a UV-C disinfection robot

Abstract

Increasingly robots are adopted for routine tasks such as cleaning and disinfection of public spaces, raising questions about attitudes and trust of professional cleaners who might in future have robots as teammates, and whether the general public feels reassured that disinfection is carried out
by robots. In this paper, we present the results of a mixedmethods user study exploring how trust and reassurance by both professional cleaners and members of the public is affected by the use of a UV-C robot and information about its performance disinfecting a simulated classroom. The results show a range
of insights for those designing and wishing to deploy UV-C robots: we found that trust and reassurance is affected by information about the UV-C robots’ task performance, with more information coinciding with significantly more agreement to be able to judge that the robot is doing a good job, although
care should be taken when designing information about task performance to avoid misinterpretation. Overall, the results suggest a generally positive picture regarding the use of UVC disinfecting robots and that cleaning professionals would be happy to have them as their teammates; however, there were
also some concerns regarding the effect on less-skilled jobs. Taken together, our results provide considerations to make UVC robots welcomed by cleaning teams as well as to provide reassurance to space users.
Index Terms—human-robot interaction, UV-C light, disinfection, trust, reassurance

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Identifiers

ORCID for Pauline Leonard: orcid.org/0000-0002-8112-0631

ORCID for Chira Nasya Tochia: orcid.org/0000-0001-8025-5991

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