Contents I. Introduction
The situations in which human-robot teams are beneficial are wide-ranging, and include life or death situations such as search and rescue missions. These teams can have a variety of beneficial features built into the robots, their software, and the interface humans use to interact with them. Additionally, there are human factors which affect HRTI, including situational awareness, mental workload, and trust in autonomy. Fatigue can negatively impact SA and cognitive abilities, and negatively affect the performance of human-robot teams (HRT). In addition to other countermeasures to the effects of fatigue, one previously undeveloped line of research is that the level of automation of the robots in the team can increase in order to lower the cognitive load for the human team member, thereby potentially reducing mistakes in judgment and proceeding more quickly when the human team member’s ability to make decisions or act is incapacitated to any large degree by fatigue. Fatigue may also affect risk within HRTI by causing delays and risk-taking behavior on the part of the human given higher levels or different kinds of risk involved. We intend to explore this possibility in the present study. We will primarily explore the effect of fatigue on such teams and its relationship with risk, and secondarily, how adaptive levels of autonomy within them can be used as an additional countermeasure for fatigue, specifically exploring RQ1 and RQ2: RQ1: How do different levels of fatigue and different kinds of salient risk affect decisions as well as response times? RQ2: How does increasing levels of robot autonomy within HRTI impact team performance in cases where humans are experiencing high levels of fatigue, given different kinds of salient risk?
