Endowing robots with self-modeling abilities for trustful human-robot interactions

Robots involved in collaborative and cooperative tasks with humans cannot be programmed in all their functions. They are autonomous entities acting in a dynamic and often partially known environment. How to interact with the humans and the decision process are determined by the knowledge on the environment, on the other and on itself. Also, the level of trust that each member of the team places in the other is crucial to creating a fruitful collaborative relationship. We hypothesize that one of the main components of a trustful relationship resides in the self-modeling abilities of the robot. The paper illustrates how employing the model of trust by Falcone and Castelfranchi to include self-modeling skills in the NAO humanoid robot involved in trustworthy interactions. Self-modeling skills are then implemented employing features by the BDI paradigm.