MIT Humans and Automation Lab
Collaboration
and distributed decision making is a critical component for
network-centric operations like those needed for first-response teams,
air traffic control, and military command and control. In these complex systems,
allowing remotely located individuals and/or groups the ability to leverage
information both locally and globally to come to decisions is critical.
However, since these systems necessarily contain high levels of automation,
it is a fundamental human supervisory control problem to determine what roles
or sharing of roles is effective, and how intelligent autonomy may improve
or degrade time sensitive team decisions. This research effort involves the
development of technology to support collaborative decision making between
both humans and humans and computers. In particular, this project focuseson
supporting teams of operators interacting with highly autonomous unmanned vehicle
systems (UVSs) during time-sensitive intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance
(ISR) missions. In addition, several assistive collaboration technologies
are currently under development, including activity awareness interface technologies and interruption assistance
technologies to facilitate the planning and coordination activities of
both individual team members and team supervisors.
Participants: Boeing
Phantom Works, Thales, Air
Force Research Lab, Charles River
Analytics, Office of Naval Research, University of Central
Florida's MIT2 Lab
This
project is a continuation of research for the Combat System of the Future,
a Naval Submarine that will be operational 20-25 years down the road. The
main focus of current research is the design of a Mobile Situational Awareness
Tool (MSAT) to aid the commander in collision avoidance for surface operations.
A Cognitive Task Analysis has been completed, and the informational requirements
were used in the design of the MSAT. In order to determine the usefulness
of this tool, testing is currently underway to determine the added benefit
of this tool when compared with current navigation methods, including the
usefulness of an automatic path planner for path planning/re-planning.
» see video
Related paper:
Carrigan, G. P., (2009), The Design of an Intelligent Decision Support Tool for Submarine Commander, S. M. Thesis, MIT Engineering Systems Divisvion, Human Systems Engineering Track, Cambridge, MA.
Sponsored by Rite Solutions
The goal of this research is to evaluate the effectiveness of an Interrruption Recovery Assistant tool in reducing the negative effects of interruptions on recovery time, decision accuracy and overal task performance of team supervisors in a simulated futuristic Unmanned Aerial Vehicles team task environment.
This research is funded by Boeing
HACT is an innovative taxonomy aimed at providing a new information-processing model for collaborative human-computer decision-making, defining specific collaboration roles (moderator, generator, and decider) and their characteristics, and representing collaboration in a direct-perception visualization. HACT can be both used to describe and compare command and control system(s) from a collaboration standpoint. Future research based on HACT will incorporate design trade-off characterizations in order to provide system designer with a cost-benefit analysis tool.
S. Bruni, J.J. Marquez, A. Brzezinski, C. Nehme and Y. Boussemart (2007). Introducing a Human-Automation Collaboration Taxonomy (HACT) in Command and Control Decision-Support Systems, Accepted, 12th International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium, Newport, RI, June, 2007.
Sponsored by Boeing Phantom Works
