TRUST, situation awareness and automation use: Exploring the effect of visual information degradations on human perception and performance in human-telerobot system

Today's military and industry increasingly uses human-robot system to perform complex tasks, such as firefighting. Automated systems that support or even make important decisions require human operators to understand and trust automation in order to rely on it appropriately. This study used a real human-telerobot system performing a firefighting task in an unknown welding room to examine the effects of two different levels of automation associated with intermittent and permanent visual system degradation on human performance, trust in automation, mental workload and situation awareness. Twenty-four participants were divided into two groups based on the level of automation use. Each participant completed a series of three 30-minutes sessions in which he or she was required to explore the threat targets in an unknown "hazard" welding room. Results indicated a significant difference between low and high level of control in collision rate when permanent error occurred. And in low level automation group the type of error had a significant effect on the collision rate, while it had a significant effect on situation awareness dimensions in both groups. Generally, in the experiment high level of automation had better performance than low level of automation especially if it is more reliable, suggesting that subjects in the high level of automation group could rely on the automatic implementation to perform the task more effectively and more accurately.