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Workplace research suggests that roughly equal communication between teammates is positively associated with team effectiveness. A distinction between teams in these studies and distributed action teams is the degree of role specialization and context-driven communication which may entail unequal degrees of communication. Yet, distributed action teams may have more equal footing to provide inputs in contexts such as mission planning or briefings. Twenty-two ad hoc teams participated in a simulated ground combat vehicle task in which teams conducted six-missions and briefed before each mission. We used team performance, team situation awareness, team workload, and team resilience as team effectiveness criteria. Balanced degrees of communication in mission briefs were correlated with performance and resilience measures, and largely uncorrelated with situation-awareness and workload measures. The overall amount of communication was also largely uncorrelated with all effectiveness measures. The results suggest that communication balance in mission briefs may help predict effectiveness in action teams.
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Team and Individual Trust Progression for Human-Autonomy Teaming in Next Generation Combat Vehicles
This study investigated in 22 teams, individual and team trust measures reported by two human participants, recruited from a university populace, as they interacted with each other, robotic combat vehicles (RCVs), a human superior, and their team during a simulated Next Generation Combat Vehicle (NGCV) mission conducted within Minecraft. Trust was measured via survey questions based on established metrics and was found to be high toward the human peer, the human superior, and the overall team throughout the mission. In contrast, overall trust in the RCV was significantly lower in phases of the mission when breakdown in RCV functionality caused a hindrance in mission completion. Trust in the RCV was shown to recover as the mission progressed in phases without RCV maintenance issues. The findings reinforce that trust is distinguishable at the individual level and not necessarily perceived the same at the team level.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1828010
- PAR ID:
- 10432734
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting
- Volume:
- 66
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2169-5067
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 157 to 161
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Resilient teams overcome sudden, dynamic changes by enacting rapid, adaptive responses that maintain system effectiveness. We analyzed two experiments on human-autonomy teams (HATs) operating a simulated remotely piloted aircraft system (RPAS) and correlated dynamical measures of resilience with measures of team performance. Across both experiments, HATs experienced automation and autonomy failures, using a Wizard of Oz paradigm. Team performance was measured in multiple ways, using a mission-level performance score, a target processing efficiency score, a failure overcome score, and a ground truth resilience score. Novel dynamical systems metrics of resilience measured the timing of system reorganization in response to failures across RPAS layers, including vehicle, controls, communications layers, and the system overall. Time to achieve extreme values of reorganization and novelty of reorganization were consistently correlated with target processing efficiency and ground truth resilience across both studies. Correlations with mission-level performance and the overcome score were apparent but less consistent. Across both studies, teams displayed greater system reorganization during failures compared to routine task conditions. The second experiment revealed differential effects of team training focused on coordination coaching and trust calibration. These results inform the measurement and training of resilience in HATs using objective, real-time resilience analysis.more » « less
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Objective This work examines two human–autonomy team (HAT) training approaches that target communication and trust calibration to improve team effectiveness under degraded conditions. Background Human–autonomy teaming presents challenges to teamwork, some of which may be addressed through training. Factors vital to HAT performance include communication and calibrated trust. Method Thirty teams of three, including one confederate acting as an autonomous agent, received either entrainment-based coordination training, trust calibration training, or control training before executing a series of missions operating a simulated remotely piloted aircraft. Automation and autonomy failures simulating degraded conditions were injected during missions, and measures of team communication, trust, and task efficiency were collected. Results Teams receiving coordination training had higher communication anticipation ratios, took photos of targets faster, and overcame more autonomy failures. Although autonomy failures were introduced in all conditions, teams receiving the calibration training reported that their overall trust in the agent was more robust over time. However, they did not perform better than the control condition. Conclusions Training based on entrainment of communications, wherein introduction of timely information exchange through one team member has lasting effects throughout the team, was positively associated with improvements in HAT communications and performance under degraded conditions. Training that emphasized the shortcomings of the autonomous agent appeared to calibrate expectations and maintain trust. Applications Team training that includes an autonomous agent that models effective information exchange may positively impact team communication and coordination. Training that emphasizes the limitations of an autonomous agent may help calibrate trust.more » « less
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INTRODUCTION: Apollo-11 (A-11) was the first manned space mission to successfully bring astronauts to the moon and return them safely. Effective team based communications is required for mission specialists to work collaboratively to learn, engage, and solve complex problems. As part of NASA’s goal in assessing team and mission success, all vital speech communications between these personnel were recorded using the multi-track SoundScriber system onto analog tapes, preserving their contribution in the success of one of the greatest achievements in human history. More than +400 personnel served as mission specialists/support who communicated across 30 audio loops, resulting in +9k hours of data for A-11. To ensure success of this mission, it was necessary for teams to communicate, learn, and address problems in a timely manner. Previous research has found that compatibility of individual personalities within teams is important for effective team collaboration of those individuals. Hence, it is essential to identify each speaker’s role during an Apollo mission and analyze group communications for knowledge exchange and problem solving to achieve a common goal. Assessing and analyzing speaker roles during the mission can allow for exploring engagement analysis for multi-party speaker situations. METHOD: The UTDallas Fearless steps Apollo data is comprised of 19,000 hours (A-11,A-13,A-1) possessing unique and multiple challenges as it is characterized by severe noise and degradation as well as overlap instances over the 30 channels. For our study, we have selected a subset of 100 hours manually transcribed by professional annotators for speaker labels. The 100 hours are obtained from three mission critical events: 1. Lift-Off (25 hours) 2. Lunar-Landing (50 hours) 3. Lunar-Walking (25 hours). Five channels of interest, out of 30 channels were selected with the most speech activity, the primary speakers operating these five channels are command/owners of these channels. For our analysis, we select five speaker roles: Flight Director (FD), Capsule Communicator (CAPCOM), Guidance, Navigation and, Control (GNC), Electrical, environmental, and consumables manager (EECOM), and Network (NTWK). To track and tag individual speakers across our Fearless Steps audio dataset, we use the concept of ‘where’s Waldo’ to identify all instances of our speakers-of-interest across a cluster of other speakers. Also, to understand speaker roles of our speaker-of-interests, we use speaker duration of primary speaker vs secondary speaker and speaker turns as our metrics to determine the role of the speaker and to understand their responsibility during the three critical phases of the mission. This enables a content linking capability as well as provide a pathway to analyzing group engagement, group dynamics of people working together in an enclosed space, psychological effects, and cognitive analysis in such individuals. IMPACT: NASA’s Apollo Program stands as one of the most significant contributions to humankind. This collection opens new research options for recognizing team communication, group dynamics, and human engagement/psychology for future deep space missions. Analyzing team communications to achieve such goals would allow for the formulation of educational and training technologies for assessment of STEM knowledge, task learning, and educational feedback. Also, identifying these personnel can help pay tribute and yield personal recognition to the hundreds of notable engineers and scientist who made this feat possible. ILLUSTRATION: In this work, we propose to illustrate how a pre-trained speech/language network can be used to obtain powerful speaker embeddings needed for speaker diarization. This framework is used to build these learned embeddings to label unique speakers over sustained audio streams. To train and test our system, we will make use of Fearless Steps Apollo corpus, allowing us to effectively leverage a limited label information resource (100 hours of labeled data out of +9000 hours). Furthermore, we use the concept of 'Finding Waldo' to identify key speakers of interest (SOI) throughout the Apollo-11 mission audio across multiple channel audio streams.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/1071181322661054
