Exploring the Effects of Swarm Degradations on Trustworthiness Perceptions, Reliance Intentions, and Reliance Behaviors

Abstract

Swarms comprise robotic assets operating autonomously through local control laws. Research on human-swarm interaction (HSwI) investigates how human operators collaborate with swarms to accomplish shared goals. Researchers have begun to investigate the role of trust in HSwI, specifically which aspects of robotic swarms affect human trust. Through a human factors lens, the present research builds on earlier HSwI work and investigates the effect of swarm asset degradations on trustworthiness perceptions, reliance intentions, and reliance behaviors. Results showed that trustworthiness perceptions of and intentions to rely on swarms (but not reliance behaviors) were correlated, demonstrating the relation between theoretically relevant antecedents to trust in HSwI contexts. Contrary to past work, the results showed no statistical evidence that asset degradations differentially affect trustworthiness perceptions, reliance intentions, or reliance behaviors. Limitations of the current work (e.g., heterogeneity of post-intervention foraging behavior, sample size) are discussed and followed with future research suggestions.

The Effect of Asset Degradation on Trust in Swarms: A Reexamination of System-Wide Trust in Human-Swarm Interaction

“…Roboticists and psychologists have leveraged natural swarm constraints in designing robotic swarms (Kolling et al, 2015) and investigated what contextual features shape human-swarm coordination (Walker et al, 2016). The present research focuses on trust in human-swarm interaction (HSwI) and replicates and extends work (i.e., Capiola et al, 2020;Hamdan et al, 2021) on the effects of asset degradation on human trust toward swarms through the lens of system-wide trust (SWT) theory (Keller & Rice, 2010).…”

“…RQ3: Do people choose to rely on the swarm algorithms or control the swarms themselves in a target foraging task? When swarms experience degradation, their objective cohesiveness (uniformity of asset dispersal) and obstacle avoidance (avoiding nofly zones) is reduced (Capiola et al, 2020;Hamdan et al, 2021). People attend to visual features to derive swarm trustworthiness (Liu et al, 2019;Nam et al, 2018), and qualitative data show people do attend to swarm cohesiveness (Capiola et al, 2021) and obstacle avoidance (Capiola et al, 2020).…”

“…The simulator (Walker et al, 2012) was produced in Microsoft Visual Studio 2017. Simulator parameters were adapted to investigate the effects of asset degradation on HSwI (Capiola et al, 2020(Capiola et al, , 2021Hamdan et al, 2021). For all scenarios, the swarm comprised 256 assets per past work of Capiola et al and Hamdan et al Parameters (i.e., percent of asset degradation, time at which degradation occurred, targets, no-fly zone coordinates) were specified in a text file.…”

“…Based on the findings from Nam et al (2017), in which visual features influenced peoples' trust toward swarms, and the postulates of SWT theory (Keller & Rice, 2010), Capiola et al (2020) hypothesized and found support for a negative relationship between depicted asset degradation and trust toward the entire swarm. Hamdan et al (2021) sought to extend Capiola et al's (2020) work with two modifications: first, participants could offer a swarm redirection once per trial and were incentivized for their performance. Second, by measuring trustworthiness, trust, and behaviors, Hamdan et al (2021) assessed the trust process as explicated in organizational (Mayer et al, 1995) and human factors (Chiou & Lee, 2021;Lee & See, 2004) psychology.…”

“…There are some potential limitations in Capiola et al (2020) and Hamdan et al (2021). First, they did not include a control condition for comparison with other levels of asset degradation.…”