Does Performative Autonomy improve Situation Awareness in Highly Demanding Collaborative Tasks?

Sayanti Roy and Tom Williams

Companion Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI LBRs)

In human-robot collaboration tasks, robots have the opportunity to communicate relevant information to human teammates, inform them about critical situations, and seek guidance during decision-making. Researchers have recently introduced the concept of \textit{Performative Autonomy}, an autonomy design approach in which robots performs lower levels of autonomy than they actually possess (e.g., seeking advice that they do not genuinely require) to enhance human situational awareness. In our study (n = 404), we implemented \textit{Performative Autonomy} in a resource management game, where the robot periodically interacts with human teammates in ways intended to enhance situational awareness. Unfortunately, the experimental testbed used in this work did not lead to demonstrated impacts of this strategy.