Towards Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems in Space

As people venture into space, they will bring with them fleets of robots. Maintaining people's trust in their robot teammates needs to be studied in a way that is realistic about robots being less than completely reliable. It has been shown in the past that when one agent in a system is unreliable, people tend to stop using the whole system [11]. To mitigate this, we created a single identity shared among all the agents in a multi-agent system. We conducted a study where participants worked to make repairs on a lunar base with robots that made several errors. Results are still being collected, but so far the data indicates that a shared identity mental model tends to be better at maintaining system-wide trust than a model where the agents had separate identities. In my future work, I wish to investigate how this shared identity could be used to make the loss of robots in space (like the Opportunity Rover) less distressing to their human teammates.