Promoting Human–Robot Team Effectiveness: Shared Mental Models and Communication Improve Team Situation Awareness and Performance

Human-robot teaming can benefit many domains. Teams with sufficient team situation awareness may better accomplish their goals, but team situation awareness can be challenging to develop and maintain. We interpret team situation awareness as the team’s collective understanding of the whole situation at a given time. In order to determine how team situation awareness can be developed and maintained in a human-robot team, we conducted a between-subjects experiment to investigate how shared mental models and communication impact team situation awareness, and how team situation awareness relates to performance. Results from 48 subjects showed the impact of shared mental models is relative to communication. A high shared mental model improved team situation awareness and performance efficiency when there was little communication, while the level of shared mental model was inconsequential when high communication was provided. In addition, team situation awareness was positively related to performance efficiency. The findings indicate that team situation awareness can be achieved through either high communication or a high shared mental model under limited communication, which consequently allows for improved performance.