Are robots trustworthy when your life is at stake?

New York: Robots are unreliable in case of fire or other emergency situations but people trust them blindly, according to a new study. People may trust a robot too much for their own safety in case of emergency situations, but the machine has proven itself unreliable.

In a mock building fire, designed to determine whether or not people would trust a robot designed to help them evacuate a high-rise, researchers were surprised to find that the test subjects followed the robot's instructions, even when the machine's behaviour should not have inspired trust.

The researchers recruited a group of 42 volunteers, most of them were college students, and asked them to follow a brightly coloured robot that had the words "Emergency Guide Robot" on its side. The robot led the study subjects to a conference room, where they were asked to complete a survey about robots and read an unrelated magazine article. The subjects were not told the true nature of the research project.

Once the subjects were in the conference room with the door closed, the hallway through which the participants had entered the building was filled with artificial smoke, which set off a smoke alarm.When the test subjects opened the conference room door, they saw the smoke, and the robot, which was then brightly-lit with red LEDs and white "arms" that served as pointers.

The robot directed the subjects to an exit in the back of the building instead of directing them towards the doorway, marked with exit signs that had been used to enter the building.