Impact of different interfaces on trust during authority shifting in collaborative robotics

Real-time authority handovers in human–robot collaboration demand redictable post-takeover control. This study compared keyboard control with a wrist-mounted position tracker following a common gesture-based authority switch. Thirteen participants (within-subjects, counterbalanced) performed a collaborative pick-and-place task with a cobot while trust (primary outcome) as measured using a 10-item, 5-point scale. The keyboard control produced higher trust than the tracker: mean paired difference 0.362 (1–5 scale; 95% CI [0.078, 0.646]), t(12) = 2.774, p = 0.0169; corroborated by Wilcoxon p = 0.0234 (rankbiserial
0.758; Hodges–Lehmann 0.300). Results indicate that during handovers, redictability and low input variance foster greater operator trust than embodied pose-based control. Design implications include handover human–machine interactions that make mode changes unmistakable, apply early damping/noise
rejection after takeover, and use hybrid strategies that anchor the handover with discrete inputs before reintroducing embodied control.