Worth the Wait: Understanding How the Benefits of Performative Autonomy Depend on Communication Latency

Robots deployed in space exploration contexts need to efficiently communicate with both co-located and remote teammates to perform tasks and resolve points of uncertainty. In recent work, researchers have proposed Performative Autonomy, an autonomy design strategy for enabling language-capable robots in these contexts to enhance interactants’ Situation Awareness. However, it is not yet clear how the efficacy of this autonomy design strategy might be impacted by the extreme latency that characterizes interplanetary communication. In this work, we thus present the results of the first study exploring the impact of interaction latency on the effectiveness of Performative Autonomy. Our results suggest that while Performative Autonomy exacerbates the increased task performance times required under high latency, this autonomy design strategy can be used without increasing cognitive load, even under substantial communication latency. Moreover, our results suggest that robots performing lower levels of autonomy were viewed as better teammates, and that this autonomy design strategy helped provide resilience to degradation to such perceptions that would otherwise be caused by increasing levels of latency. Overall, these results motivate further work within the new Performative Autonomy paradigm for both remote and proximal human-robot interactions, in both space-oriented and traditional, terrestrial, human-robot interaction domains.