Row Row Row Your Bot – Trust Me or Not: Investigating the Performance of Human-Robot Teams

In this work we present the latest results in Project Aquaticus manned-unmanned teaming looking at the interactions of robot autonomy, human-robot trust, robot reliability, and participant executive attention capability. Project Aquaticus enables manned-unmanned teaming research in the marine domain. It creates exciting and stressful environments for participants based on playing games of capture the flag on the water. For these experiments, a participant was teamed up with an autonomous robot teammate. For consistency, they played against a team composed of two autonomous robots. The independent variables included autonomous teammate reliability, autonomous teammate autonomy level, and task load based on opponent tactics. Forty-eight Cadets at the United State military Academy, West Point, NY played Project Aquaticus simulations using our simulation engine and a game controller. Participants performed executive attention tasks and then played four rounds of capture the flag with several questionnaires interspersed including the NASA TLX and Schaefer trust scale. We present the adaptations to the autonomous robot teammate and opponent AI for the reliability and autonomy level of the autonomous robot teammate and the scenarios performed by the opposing team. We also present the general findings of team performance based on reliability, autonomy level, and scenario difficulty