Shauna Heron, a master’s candidate in Clinical Psychology at Laurentian University, has completed groundbreaking research into human-robot trust to advance industrial safety.
Backed by the IAMGOLD President’s Innovation Fund — a strategic partnership established to inspire next-generation mining solutions and foster workplace safety — the study investigates how people form trust in collaboration with an autonomous robot that is responsive to human mental states versus one that is not.
Her co-authored research paper is currently available as a peer-reviewed preprint on the open-access repository ArXiv.
Traditional industrial robotics focus almost entirely on routine mechanical tasks. Heron’s research explores what happens when robots become collaborative partners capable of spoken dialogue, real-time adaptation and social interaction.
Using the expressive Misty II robot platform, Heron built an autonomous dialogue loop that used a series of large language models to infer human frustration, confusion, or engagement from speech, allowing the robot to adapt its facial expressions, physical movements and verbal responses in real time while helping participants complete several collaborative tasks.
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