Corine Horsch, Nanja Smets, Mark Neerincx, and Raymond Cuijpers on the "Unexpected Effects of Rescue Robots’ Team-Membership in a virtual Environment" at ISCRAM 2013 in Baden-Baden. 10th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management 12-15 May 2013, Baden-Baden, Germany

1. Unexpected effects of rescue robots’
team-membership in a virtual environment
ISCRAM - 15 May 2013
Corine Horsch, Nanja Smets, Mark Neerincx, Raymond Cuijpers

2. Urban Search And Rescue (USAR)
Maybe robots can help?

3. „A basic compact‟
Maintain common ground
Directability
Predictability
4 basic requirements for teams
(Klein, Woods, Bradshaw, Hoffman, & Feltovich, 2004)
context - robot as team player - related concepts - research question - method - results and explanation - limitations and future work

4. The four requirements influence other concepts
Shared situation awareness (SSA)
“Reflection of how similarly individuals
perceive, comprehend, and interpret
the situation’s information.”
(Bolstad et al., 2005)
Maintain common ground
probably influences SSA
SSA team performance
Team identification (TI)
“The perception of oneness with or
belongingness to a group, involving
direct or vicarious experience of its
successes and failures.” (Ashforth &
Meal, 1989)
A basic compact probably
influences TI
TI  team performance
context - robot as team player - related concepts - research question - method - results and explanation - limitations and future work

5. When a robot is made a team player
does team performance increase
and if so can this be explained by
increased shared situational awareness or
team identification
Research question
context - robot as team player - related concepts - research question - method - results and explanation - limitations and future work

6. 38 teams: 2 humans + 2 robots
Task: find victims as fast as possible in virtual office
DV: team performance, SSA, and TI
IV: level of team membership of the robot
Method in short
context - robot as team player - related concepts - research question - method - results and explanation - limitations and future work

7. Interactive map
context - robot as team player - related concepts - research question - method - results and explanation - limitations and future work

8. Condition 1:
Robot as a tool: no team membership
Only human-human collaboration
No interactive map, but pen and paper
Condition 2:
Low level of team membership
Condition 3:
Robot as a full team member
Interactive map
Robot spoke in certain situations
3 levels of team membership: 3 conditions
context - robot as team player - related concepts - research question - method - results and explanation - limitations and future work

9. Video of experiment
context - robot as team player - related concepts - research question - method - results and explanation - limitations and future work

10. context - robot as team player - related concepts - research question - method - results and explanation - limitations and future work
Video

11. When a robot is made a team player
does team performance increase
and if so can this be explained by
increased shared situational awareness or
team identification
Research question
context - robot as team player - related concepts - research question - method - results and explanation - limitations and future work

12. Results – time performance
F(2,29) = 2.45, p = .104, r = .38
context - robot as team player - related concepts - research question - method - results and explanation - limitations and future work

13. Vocal communication
F(2,35) = 3.42, p = .044, r = .40
context - robot as team player - related concepts - research question - method - results and explanation - limitations and future work

14. When a robot is made a team player
does team performance increase
and if so can this be explained by
increased shared situational awareness or
team identification
Research question
context - robot as team player - related concepts - research question - method - results and explanation - limitations and future work

15. Collaboration vs. interaction
(Breazeal, Brooks, Gray, Hoffman, Kidd, Lee, … Chilongo, 2004)
Include only participants who know each other (Team Identification)
Include workload measure
Limitations and future work
context - robot as team player - related concepts - research question - method - results and explanation - limitations and future work

16. We expected that team membership would increase team
performance: opposite shown
We expected that SSA and TI could explain team performance: no
evidence provided
Based on this experiment making robots more like a team player is
not a good idea, however, when implementation is optimized we still
believe it could increase performance
Conclusion
context - robot as team player - related concepts - research question - method - results and explanation - limitations and future work

17. Thanks for your attention
Related presentation at 13:45 in room 10
Questions and remarks
NIFTi (www.nifti.eu)
Is funded by the EU FP7 Programme, ICT Cognitive Systems, Interaction, Robotics, Project #247870