Trust-based interactions in teams of mobile agents

This paper introduces a trust model that couples the change in performance in a team of agents to how the agents perceive (or trust) each other. This combination of social dynamics and physical update laws not only changes the performance of the system, but it has the potential to make it deteriorate in a dramatic fashion. In fact, in the two-agent case, it is shown that the system exhibits finite escape time through an invariance result that carries over also to larger systems and more elaborate trust models. The invariance result states that an increase in performance must be accompanied by an increase in the total trust in the network (and vice versa for deteriorating performance). Finally, the connection is made between the proposed model and the belief and group polarization phenomena encountered in group processes driven by social interaction dynamics.