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The focus of this current research is 2-fold: (1) to understand how team interaction in human-autonomy teams (HAT)s evolve in the Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) task context, and (2) to understand how HATs respond to three types of failures (automation, autonomy, and cyber-attack) over time. We summarize the findings from three of our recent experiments regarding the team interaction within HAT over time in the dynamic context of RPAS. For the first and the second experiments, we summarize general findings related to team member interaction of a three-member team over time, by comparison of HATs with all-human teams. In the third experiment, which extends beyond the first two experiments, we investigate HAT evolution when HATs are faced with three types of failures during the task. For all three of these experiments, measures focus on team interactions and temporal dynamics consistent with the theory of interactive team cognition. We applied Joint Recurrence Quantification Analysis, to communication flow in the three experiments. One of the most interesting and significant findings from our experiments regarding team evolution is the idea of entrainment, that one team member (the pilot in our study, either agent or human) can change the communication behaviors of the other teammates over time, including coordination, and affect team performance. In the first and second studies, behavioral passiveness of the synthetic teams resulted in very stable and rigid coordination in comparison to the all-human teams that were less stable. Experimenter teams demonstrated metastable coordination (not rigid nor unstable) and performed better than rigid and unstable teams during the dynamic task. In the third experiment, metastable behavior helped teams overcome all three types of failures. These summarized findings address three potential future needs for ensuring effective HAT: (1) training of autonomous agents on the principles of teamwork, specifically understanding tasks and roles of teammates, (2) human-centered machine learning design of the synthetic agent so the agents can better understand human behavior and ultimately human needs, and (3) training of human members to communicate and coordinate with agents due to current limitations of Natural Language Processing of the agents.

A novel joint decision making paradigm for assessing team coordination was developed and tested using baseball infielders. Balls launched onto an infield at different trajectories were filmed using four video cameras that were each placed at one of the typical positions of the four infielders. Each participant viewed temporally occluded videos for one of the four positions and were asked to say either “ball” if they would attempt to field it or the name of the bag that they would cover. The evaluation of two experienced coaches was used to assign a group coordination score for each trajectory and group decision times were calculated. Thirty groups of 4 current college baseball players were: (i) teammates (players from same team/view from own position), (ii) non-teammates (players from different teams/view from own position), or (iii) scrambled teammates (players from same team/view not from own position). Teammates performed significantly better (i.e., faster and more coordinated decisions) than the other two groups, whereas scrambled teammates performed significantly better than non-teammates. These findings suggest that team coordination is achieved through both experience with one’s teammates’ responses to particular events (e.g., a ball hit up the middle) and one’s own general action capabilities (e.g., running speed). The sensitivity of our joint decision making paradigm to group makeup provides support for its use as a method for studying team coordination.