A Study on Trust in a Robotic Suitcase

This work presents a study on human-robot interaction between a prototype of a robotic suitcase – aBag – and people using it. Importantly, for an autonomous robotic suitcase to be successful as a product, people need to trust it. Therefore, a study was performed, where participants used aBag (remotely operated using the Wizard of Oz technique) for carrying their belongings. Two different conditions were created: 1) aBag follows the participant at a close range; 2) aBag follows the participant on a further distance. We expected that participants would trust more aBag when it was following them at a close range, but interestingly participants seemed to trust more when aBag was further away. Also, regardless of the conditions, the level of trust in aBag was significantly higher after the interaction compared to before, bringing positive results to the development of this kind of robotic apparatus.