Predicting Trust in Human Control of Swarms via Inverse Reinforcement Learning

In this paper, we study the model of human trust where an operator controls a robotic swarm remotely for a search mission. Existing trust models in human-in the-loop systems are based on task performance of robots. However, we find that humans tend to make their decisions based on physical characteristics of the swarm rather than its performance since task performance of swarms is not clearly perceivable by humans. We formulate trust as a Markov decision process whose state space includes physical parameters of the swarm. We employ an inverse reinforcement learning algorithm to learn behaviors of the operator from a single demonstration. The learned behaviors are used to predict the trust level of the operator based on the features of the swarm.