Evaluating Robotic Performative Autonomy In Latency-Sensitive Collaborative Contexts

Rafael Sousa Silva and Cailyn Smith and Lara Ferreira Bezerra and Tom Williams

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation

Maintaining Situational Awareness (SA) is critical in space exploration contexts, yet made particularly difficult due to the presence of communication latency. In order to increase human SA without inducing cognitive overload, researchers have proposed Performative Autonomy (PA), in which robots intentionally interact at a lower level of autonomy than they are capable of. While researchers have demonstrated positive impacts of PA on team performance even under high latency, previous work on PA has not examined how the benefits of PA might be mediated by latency. In this work, we thus interrogate the impact of latency and PA on trust, SA, and human perceptions of robot intelligence and autonomy. Our results suggest that lower performed autonomy leads to increased cognitive load, especially when latency is present. In addition, we observe no effect of the PA strategies used within our experimental paradigm on SA, and instead find evidence that operating under high latency leads to negative perceptions of robots regardless of choice of PA strategy.