Evaluation of Human-Autonomy Team Trust for Weaponized Robotic Combat Vehicles

Abstract: Phase I of the Soldier Operational Experiment was held at Fort Carson, Colorado in 2020, to assess the current capability of a manned vehicle and unmanned weaponized vehicle collaborative team capabilities during live fire gunnery operations and situational training exercises. Here we discuss the performance of the crews during these exercises, and the implementation of team trust metrics to evaluate crew dynamics in these human-autonomy lethality teams. The gunnery exercise performance scores demonstrated that teams were often able to achieve qualifying scores on the relevant gunnery standards. However, subjective measures showed relatively low to moderate levels of trust across crew members. Through further analysis we found that Soldiers opted to perform many tasks manually and were slow to adapt to and use the technologies, even with substantial training on the systems. One possible reason for this response to the technology was due to the technology being early in a development cycle and completely new to the users. Linguistic analyses were conducted on the crew communication in order to provide a more fine-grained analysis of the team dynamic. Results indicated that higher performing crews used more formal communication with words associated with perception (e.g., seeing, hearing, etc.). In line with previous field studies through the Wingman Joint Capabilities Technology Demonstration, this study further validated a multi-method approach to understanding performance, trust, and cohesion in human-autonomy teams.

Keywords: Trust, cohesion, human-autonomy team

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1001491

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