Incremental learning in trust-based vehicle control

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.