Advanced Mission Display and Planning Tools (AMPT)

Naval unmanned vehicle operators require mission displays that enable them to better collaborate with planning automation to rapidly understand and respond to complex and dynamic operating environments. To address this need, we will design and demonstrate Advanced Mission Display and Planning Tools (AMPT) that reduce the workload of re-planning and re-tasking teams of heterogeneous unmanned vehicles. These decision-support interfaces will use simple visual structures to convey complex behavior-shaping events and operational constrains, enabling operators to intuitively perceive system status, identify response requirements, and efficiently direct automated planning tools. Under the proposed Phase II AMPT effort we will first expand prior analyses of unmanned operations to characterize operators need for observability and directability of automated planning tools within a targeted mission domain, emphasizing persistent ISR in littoral environments. We will then leverage this analysis to refine our design of AMPT ecological mission displays for supervisory control of heterogeneous vehicle teams. Finally, we will expand the breadth and depth of our current AMPT mission display prototypes and integrate these with representative Navy planning technologies. We will use these prototypes to demonstrate and evaluate our approaches and to deeply explore the complexities of rapid re-planning and re-tasking of unmanned vehicles across domains.