Minimizing the Impact of Cognitive and Physical Limitations from Humans and Autonomy Through the Development, Training, and Implementation of Human-AutonomyTeaming in Underwater Environments
Abstract
Summary/Abstract - Approved for Public ReleaseHuman-autonomy teaming is founded on the basis that humans and autonomy both have unique capabilities and that integrating each through teaming will bolster overall outcomes. Traditionally, the focus has been on simply bringing humans and autonomy together in teaming tasks and environments without accounting for the complexity and nuance needed tooptimize human-autonomy teams. Specifically, very little focus has been on human and autonomous teammates cognitive and physical limitations and how they impact the development, training, and implementation of human-autonomy teaming systems. Indeed, to best optimize human-autonomy teaming, limitations must be considered and reverse-engineered to allow for a better understanding of how humansand autonomy can best contribute individually and together in a team. In particular, this need is most apparent and paramount in extreme environments, where the limitations of both humans and autonomy, such as limited cognition or poor perception, are heightened and will directly inform when, where, and how teammates will contribute to success. As such, the proposed research explores human-autonomy teams in extreme underwater environments to advise these teams on how to consider and minimize the effects of these limitations to maximize team effectiveness.The proposed work leverages three distinct phases to understand various limitations in human-autonomy teams, design and train human-autonomy teams to overcome said limitations, and empirically quantify the ability of modern and far-future teams to bolster their effectiveness through an awareness of their limitations. Phase 1 will leverage qualitative research with multiple extreme environment teams to explore the training, impacts, and technologies that currently contribute to the consideration of limitations in teams. Simultaneously, Phase 1 will extend an existing underwater search and recovery synthetic task environment and design autonomous teammates for said environment for Phase 2 and Phase 3 experiments. Phase 2 will understand how both autonomy and humans can contribute to overcoming each others limitations in teams, which will be done through empirical experiments that explore how the role of autonomous teammates and the training of human teammates can help overcome human and autonomy limitations,respectively. Phase 3 will explore how modern human-autonomy teams can leverage this holistic understanding of limitations to outperform human-human teams in a real-world underwater search and recovery task. Lastly, Phase 3 will conclude by exploring the ability of far-future human-autonomy teams, which will have fewer limitations, to maximize performative capabilities through limitation awareness.The proposed work will make substantial scientific contributions to human-autonomy teaming and US Navy efforts. In particular,this work will create the first explicit understanding of how human-autonomy teams can minimizethe impact of limitations, bolstering human and autonomous teammates contributions to team effectiveness. These understandings will result in foundational impacts on human-autonomy teaming research, as both researchers and practitioners will be able to minimize the impact of limitations in both research and real-world teams and thus optimize HAT outcomes. Further, these contributions will directly contribute to the US Navy as considering limitations during US Navy efforts can mean the difference between mission success or failure, and this proposed work will bolster the accuracy of these considerations and, in turn, mission success. Moreover, the methodology of this work, which exploreslimitations in underwater search and recovery, will especially benefit the US Navy as their use of autonomy to conduct underwater missions will increase. Thus, the proposed work will provide immediate benefits to research that the US Navy can directly leverage toboost mission success rates.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Mar 15, 2024
- Source ID
- N000142412154
Entities
People
- Nathan McNeese
Organizations
- Clemson University
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy