The Martian Mindset: Human-Agent Teams in Extreme Environments
EXC: Human-Agent Teams in Extreme Environments
This research project is part of the DFG-funded Cluster of Excellence ?The Martian Mindset “ at the University of Bremen and will be funded for a period of seven years.
The Chair of Business Psychology and Human Resources, Prof. Dr. Vera Hagemann and Carina Litfin, is collaborating with the Center for Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (ZARM) as well as with colleagues from the materials, engineering, and information technology sciences. We are investigating teamwork and team performance in Human-Agent Teams in extreme environments and in normal as well as abnormal situations.
Scarcity of resources will be one of the key challenges for our planet in the future. One place where extreme resource scarcity is already a reality is Mars - a desert-like planet, without fossil fuels or extensive water resources and surrounded only by a thin CO2 atmosphere. These non-negotiable boundary conditions serve as an experimental setting to develop a new paradigm of sustainability. With the Martian Mindset, we rethink the use of severely limited resources from scratch and will design radically new production systems and manufacturing processes for this scenario. As the human resource will be scarce, designing novel operating concepts for production systems that are jointly operated by small teams of humans and robots in situations of great uncertainty and limited information is an essential part of the EXC. Research with this focus is carried out in the EXC in Research Area 3: Operating.
The astronaut crew belongs to a High Responsibility Team (HRT). Thus, the crew is facing various challenges like having to coordinate multiple highly interactive processes coupled with the dynamic control aspect of the continuous process. HRT means teams working in extreme environments that have to work in dynamic and often unpredictable conditions and demanding work contexts. For HRT?s mistakes can have severe consequences for humans and the environment.
Agents are becoming commonplace in extreme environments, such as robots or software that supports the team, as in The Martian Mindest. Since not all tasks in the production facility and the habitat can be carried out by humans, robots and other AI-based systems are needed to carry out tasks and work together with humans, in a so-called human-agent team (HAT).
In this research project we want to investigate effective collaboration of humans and agents in high-risk environments. We strive to expand our knowledge about optimal collaboration in terms of teamwork processes or emergent states and their effects on team performance. In doing so, we examine teamwork processes not only in risk situations, but also in situations that shift from routine to non-routine.