Stepping out of the shadow of human-human teaming: Crafting a unique identity for human-autonomy teams

While the rapid expansion of human-autonomy teaming can and should be aided by using historically beneficial theories from human-human teams, the advent of human-autonomy teaming should also possess a unique identity that explicitly denotes the specific advantages, limitations, and considerations these teams will present to society. As such, continuing to frame human-autonomy teams as technologically advanced human-human teams might not only restrict the global effectiveness of these teams but doing so might also stagnate these teams from being well perceived and respected by humans. However, recent efforts to differentiate human-autonomy teams have prioritized the differentiation from human-autonomy interactions rather than human-human teams. The following article further differentiates human-autonomy teams from human-human teams by first discussing the core differentiating considerations of human-autonomy teams. These considerations are then used to craft research trajectories that simultaneously leverage past theory in human-human teaming and the specific limitations and capabilities of human-autonomy teams to further propel and differentiate this novel teaming construct. In doing the above, this work presents a novel teaming construct that merges teamwork and human-computer interaction research to craft a standalone but theory-driven identity for human-autonomy teams, and this identity will serve future research to help better differentiate human-autonomy and human-human teaming.