Enhanced Operator Situational Awareness for Multi-Unmanned Vehicle Teams

SoarTech proposes to research and design Sapient an intelligent, multi-vehicle operator control unit. Sapient extends technologies developed for the 2010 MAGIC International Robot competition, where many of Sapients display and situation awareness (SA) aids helped a team of two operators maintain SA over fourteen unmanned ground vehicles. Sapient will monitor the mission and behavior of a heterogeneous team of unmanned vehicles and present the user with filtered and fused information about the mission, detect and project important events and alert the user to them, detect and reconcile ambiguities with the user, and automate the presentation of contextual information to the user. Sapient will enable the management-by-exception control scheme allowing operators to spend less time interacting with the system and more time doing other important tasks. To achieve these results Sapient will implement computational situation awareness (CSA), and use it as a basis for intelligent control of UI displays that visually fuse information from disparate sources. Computational SA will act as a surrogate user maintaining attention on the mission and sub-tasks so that the user doesnt have to. When issues are encountered, it will communicate SA to the operator so that the operator can rapidly make the critical control decisions.