Mission Planning and Monitoring for Heterogeneous Unmanned Vehicle Teams: A Human-Centered Perspective

Abstract

Future unmanned systems in the military will be highly heterogeneous in nature, with vehicles from multiple domains-aerial, underwater, and land-working in collaborative teams to complete a variety of missions. The complexity of supervising these teams will be enormous and will rely on human creativity, judgment, and experience. Therefore, the design and development of mission planning and monitoring technologies must be rooted in a deep understanding of the human operator's role as mission manager, and must effectively address the reasoning skills and limitations of both the human and autonomous intelligent system. In this paper we present our work to approach these supervisory issues from a human-centered perspective. We first review the findings of a cognitive task analysis, through which we defined critical informational requirements and developed display interfaces for human operators developing and executing mission plans for a small team of underwater and aerial unmanned vehicles. These findings raise several operations issues for unmanned vehicle management, namely (1) vehicle and task heterogeneity and (2) the coordination of command and control across a vehicle team. We discuss the impact of both of these design requirements on the human-centered development of mission planning tools for unmanned systems. Finally, we introduce an investigative approach to support the rapid evaluation of interfaces that flexibly accommodate alternative command and control philosophies for heterogeneous automated systems using a combination of modeling and human-in-the-loop evaluation processes

Marine UAV–USV Marsupial Platform: System and Recovery Technic Verification

“…First, in order to ensure a smooth implementation of the verification test and the stability of the system, it is necessary to study methods such as USV motion simulation and compensation stabilization in the case of wave fluctuations. Since the two types of platforms, UAVs and USVs, are heterogeneous platforms, they have many differences in structure, kinematics and dynamic models, and control methods [22][23][24][25][26]. Therefore, techniques such as active modeling of relative motion of heterogeneous platforms, coordinated autonomous control of heterogeneous platforms, and relative position and attitude measurement during high-speed motion of heterogeneous platforms need to be studied.…”

Human Factors Issues with Operating Unmanned Underwater Vehicles

“…Also, advances in autonomy are expected to allow AUVs to take part in military missions that are time-sensitive and require complex coordination (US Navy, 2004). In fact, some researchers are examining how teams of AUVs or mixed unmanned platforms can work together (Kilgore, Harper, Nehme, & Cummings, 2007) . Thus, in the future one operator may monitor multiple AUVs (Giger, Kandemir, & Dzielski, 2008).…”

Min-Max Tours for Task Allocation to Heterogeneous Agents

“…Such problems have been widely considered in the literature [1][2][3][4][5], most typically for the case where all agents are the same. However, future multi-robot systems are also projected to have a large amount of diversity in terms of the capabilities of the agents, and the applications will consist of tasks that can only be done by agents that possess certain capabilities [6][7][8][9][10]. We address this problem in this paper, namely allocating tasks efficiently to heterogeneous agents while meeting task-agent compatibility constraints.…”