In many multi-agent teams, entities fully trust their teammates and the information that they provide. But we know that this can be a false assumption in many cases, which can lead to sub-optimal performance of the team. In this paper, we build off of prior work in developing a simple model of estimating and responding to different levels of trust between team members. We have chosen to use a vehicle convoy application to generate data and test the operation of the trust estimation algorithm and its evolution. We build on prior work, where a cruise control algorithm to maintain following distance was implemented, as were algorithms to adjust follow distance based on trust in the leader and the capability for a lead vehicle to “look back” and adjust its speed based on the follow distance of the vehicle behind. In this paper we introduce a mechanism, based on trust, which negotiates between two follow behaviors, either follow the vehicle ahead or drive towards a set of fixed waypoints. We also add a nonlinear relationship between trust and follow distance to provide a knob to adjust convoy performance and the paper shows that it does adjust performance, somewhat as expected.

Date Published: 13 May 2016
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 9837, Unmanned Systems Technology XVIII, 983704 (13 May 2016); doi: 10.1117/12.2223168

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9837:
Unmanned Systems Technology XVIII
Robert E. Karlsen; Douglas W. Gage; Charles M. Shoemaker; Grant R. Gerhart, Editor(s)