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From the robotic cockroach designed to squeeze into tiny gaps, to Atlas, a humanoid robot that can withstand an attack and get to safety, rescue robots are all the rage. They can drive vehicles, open doors and more. Why wouldn't you trust one to get you to safety?

A new study from the Georgia Institute of Technology suggests that thoughtlessly trusting a rescue robot to save you may not be your best plan. Test subjects followed the study's Emergency Guide Robot even after it had proved itself unreliable. And in some cases the subjects trusted the robot even after they'd been told it had broken down entirely. "People seem to believe that these robotic systems know more about the world than they really do, and that they would never make mistakes or have any kind of fault," said Alan Wagner, who worked on the project, in a press release. "In our studies, the test subjects followed the robot's directions even to the point where it might have put them in danger had this been a real emergency."


42 subjects were asked to follow a robot with the words 'Emergency Guide Robot' printed on its side. The robot guided the volunteers into a number of rooms -- in some cases a conference room, where they filled in a survey about robots. In others, the robot led the volunteers into the wrong room and sometimes broke down completely. None of the subjects knew the true nature of the experiment.

The volunteers were then subjected to a fake emergency and guided to safety -- or potential danger -- by the robot. The team expected to find that robots shown to be untrustworthy wouldn't be trusted -- but they were. "Instead, all of the volunteers followed the robot's instructions, no matter how well it had performed previously. We absolutely didn't expect this," said Paul Robinette, who helped conduct the study.

The team explained that volunteers may have responded this way because the robots had become "authority figures". They now hope to expand their research to better understand the relationship of trust between the humans and their robots. "Would people trust a hamburger-making robot to provide them with food?" asked Robinette. "If a robot carried a sign saying it was a 'child-care robot', would people leave their babies with it? Will people put their children into an autonomous vehicle and trust it to take them to grandma’s house? We don't know why people trust or don't trust machines."