Autonomy as a Teammate: Evaluation of Teammate-Likeness

What makes an autonomous system a teammate? The paper presents an evaluation of factors that can encourage a human perceive an autonomous system as a teammate rather than a tool. Increased perception of teammate-likeness more closely matches the human’s expectations of a teammate’s behavior, benefiting coordination and cooperation. Previous work with commercial pilots suggested that autonomous systems should provide visible cues of actions situated in the work environment. These results motivated the present study to investigate the impact of feedback modality on the teammate-likeness of an autonomous system under low (sequential events) and high (concurrent events) task loads. A Cognitive Assistant (CA) was developed as an autonomous teammate to support a (simulated) Mars mission. With centralized feedback, an autonomous teammate provided verbal and written information on a dedicated display. With distributed feedback, the autonomous teammate provided visible cues of actions in the environment in addition to centralized feedback. Perception of teammate-likeness increased with distributed feedback due to increased awareness of the CA’s actions, especially under low task load. In high task load, teamwork performance was higher with distributed feedback when compared to centralized feedback, where in low task load there was no difference in teamwork performance between feedback modalities.