The future vision of military Soldier-robot teams is one in which Soldiers and robots work together to complete separate, but interdependent tasks that advance the goals of the mission. However, in the near term, robots will be limited in their ability to successfully perform tasks without, at least, occasional assistance from their human teammates. A need exists to design, in robots, mechanisms that can support human situation awareness (SA) regarding the operations of the robot, which humans

more »

... an use to provide interventions in robot tasks. The purpose of the current study was to test the effects of information exchanges provided by a robot on the development of SA in a human partner, under differing levels of visual perspective taking, and the consequential effects on the quality of human assistance provided to a robot. After data screening, fiftysix male participants ranging in age from 18 to 29 (M= 18.89, SD= 3.412) were included in the analysis of the results. Hierarchical multiple regression and a series of ANOVAs with comparisons between individual within-subjects study conditions were conducted to analyze five Hypotheses. The results of this study revealed that if robots, through robotto-human information exchanges, can increasingly support a human's understanding of when assistance is needed, humans will be better able to provide that assistance. As opposed to originally hypothesized, this study also showed that fewer instances in which robots share status information with their human counterparts may be more beneficial for supporting awareness, assistance, and dual task performance than more information sharing, by guarding against performance decrements that could be the result of receiving iv too many robot-to-human information exchanges. It was also thought that anchoring robot-to-human information sharing with spatial information in reference to the human's view of the environment would be most beneficial for supporting awareness regarding the robot and assistance provided to the robot. This notion was not supported. Instead, results suggested that if extra spatial information is added to robot-to-human information exchanges, representing that spatial information in reference to a cardinal, global-relative perspective of the environment may be better for supporting awareness and assistance than representing that information in reference to the human's view of the environment. v For Daniel, my favorite vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It's rarely true that people achieve great things on their own. I am extremely grateful for a number of people who supported me in this endeavor. Thank you to the members of my dissertation committee: Randall Shumaker, Valerie Sims, Clint Bowers, and my academic advisor and director of the Team Performance Lab (TPL), Florian Jentsch. Under your guidance, TPL has done more for my personal and professional development than I thought possible when I started on this path. I never imagined that I would get this far, and I am forever grateful for the opportunities you have afforded me. To my lab colleagues and research assistants, Andrew (Thank you for shouldering the extra work so that I could finish this thing. It did not go unnoticed)