Existing maritime navigation and reconnaissance systems require man-in-the-loop situation awareness for obstacle avoidance, area survey analysis, threat assessment, and mission re-planning. We have developed a boat with fully autonomous navigation, surveillance, and reactive behaviors. Autonomous water navigation is achieved with no prior maps or other data -the water surface, riverbanks obstacles, movers and salient objects are discovered and mapped in real-time using a circular array of cameras along with a self-directed pan-tilt camera. The autonomous boat has been tested on harbor and river domains. Results of the detection, tracking, mapping and navigation will be presented.
The operators of nuclear power plants are asked to perform a task that has proven to be particularly difficult: manual control of feedwater during startup. We have initiated a research and development program to address human factors issues related to this task. An analysis of cognitive aspects of the feedwater control task was used to develop a generic part-task simulator. New displays to enhance manual control performance (including a predictor display) were developed with the simulator. The test capability provided by the simulator allowed precise measurement of performance differences associated with these displays in a mixed-fidelity laboratory experiment. The results suggest that the displays reduced the complexity of the task and resulted in improved operator performance.
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