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Operator trust in autonomous capability is a critical factor affecting the success of fielded unmanned systems. However, current means of identifying trusted system behavior do not sufficiently inform guidelines for designing an engineering solution. We present a novel Trust Assessment Framework for providing actionable and formative feedback for building an unmanned system that promotes operators’ initial adoption of and reliance on its autonomous capabilities. Based on a review of the unmanned systems literature and a series of inquiries focusing on operators of unmanned aerial vehicles, we have identified a set of Heuristics for Trusted Autonomy and behaviorally anchored Trust Assessment Scales that enable quantitative feedback for each heuristic category. The Heuristics and Scales were incorporated into a Trust Assessment Process consisting of a Heuristic Evaluation and subsequent scoring. This trust assessment methodology can be applied directly to assessing autonomous aerial systems. Extensions to other platforms and domains are being investigated.
Jackson et al. (Thu,) studied this question.