Understanding Human-Autonomy Teams Through a Human-Animal Teaming Model

The relationship between humans and animals is complex and influenced by multiple variables. Humans display a remarkably flexible and rich array of social competencies, demonstrating the ability to interpret, predict, and react appropriately to the behavior of others, as well as to engage others in a variety of complex social interactions. Developing computational systems that have similar social abilities is a critical step in designing robots, animated characters, and other computer agents that appear intelligent and capable in their interactions with humans and each other. Further, it will improve their ability to cooperate with people as capable partners, learn from natural instruction, and provide intuitive and engaging interactions for human partners. Thus, human-animal team analogs can be one means through which to foster veridical mental models of robots that provide a more accurate representation of their near-future capabilities. Some digital twins of human-animal teams currently exist but are often incomplete. Therefore, this article focuses on issues within and surrounding the current models of human-animal teams, previous research surrounding this connection, and the challenges when using such an analogy for human-autonomy teams.