Associates with Etiquette: Meta-Communication to Make Human-Automation Interaction more Natural, Productive and Polite

Keywords: behavior, etiquette, RPA, CIM

Abstract: Several different architectures for adaptive automation systems have now been demonstrated. Yet users remain ambivalent them—as our own work on the U.S. Air Force’s Rotorcraft Pilot’s Associate (RPA) reveals. Thus, we argue, research should be shifting away from how adaptive interfaces and automation can be made to work, and onto how they should behave in conjunction with human users. We find it useful to think about behavioral details and roles and responsibilities in terms of various ‘etiquettes’ for human-machine interactions. Results from RPA suggest that one aspect of establishing acceptable etiquette may be more and better inclusion of ‘meta-communication’ on the part of the system—the ability to report and accept feedback on the system’s perceptions and intentions. We discuss these results in the broader context of etiquette recommendations for adaptive automation systems.