Human Trust-based Feedback Control: Dynamically varying automation transparency to optimize human-machine interactions

Human trust in automation plays an essential role in interactions between humans and automation. While a lack of trust can lead to a human's disuse of automation, over-trust can result in a human trusting a faulty autonomous system which could have negative consequences for the human. Therefore, human trust should be calibrated to optimize human-machine interactions with respect to context-specific performance objectives. In this article, we present a probabilistic framework to model and calibrate a human's trust and workload dynamics during his/her interaction with an intelligent decision-aid system. This calibration is achieved by varying the automation's transparency--the amount and utility of information provided to the human. The parameterization of the model is conducted using behavioral data collected through human-subject experiments, and three feedback control policies are experimentally validated and compared against a non-adaptive decision-aid system. The results show that human-automation team performance can be optimized when the transparency is dynamically updated based on the proposed control policy. This framework is a first step toward widespread design and implementation of real-time adaptive automation for use in human-machine interactions. Automation has become prevalent in the everyday lives of humans. However, despite significant technological advancements, human supervision and intervention are still necessary in almost all sectors of automation, ranging from manufacturing and transportation to disaster-management and healthcare [1]. Therefore, we expect that the future will be built around human-agent collectives [2] that will require efficient and successful interaction and coordination between humans and machines. It is well established that to achieve this coordination, human trust in automation plays a central role [3]-[5]. For example, the benefits of automation are lost when humans override automation due to a fundamental lack of trust [3], [5], and accidents may occur due to human mistrust in such systems [6]. Therefore, trust should be appropriately calibrated to avoid disuse or misuse of automation [4].