  Robots are increasingly deployed in spaces shared with humans, including home
settings and industrial environments. In these environments, the interaction
between humans and robots (HRI) is crucial for safety, legibility, and
efficiency. A key factor in HRI is trust, which modulates the acceptance of the
system. Anthropomorphism has been shown to modulate trust development in a
robot, but robots in industrial environments are not usually anthropomorphic.
We designed a simple interaction in an industrial environment in which an
anthropomorphic mock driver (ARMoD) robot simulates to drive an autonomous
guided vehicle (AGV). The task consisted of a human crossing paths with the
AGV, with or without the ARMoD mounted on the top, in a narrow corridor. The
human and the system needed to negotiate trajectories when crossing paths,
meaning that the human had to attend to the trajectory of the robot to avoid a
collision with it. There was a significant increment in the reported trust
scores in the condition where the ARMoD was present, showing that the presence
of an anthropomorphic robot is enough to modulate the trust, even in limited
interactions as the one we present here.
