Advanced Mission Display and Planning Tools (AMPT)

Intuitive mission display visualization and planning capabilities are needed to enhance operator situation awareness when supervising teams of unmanned vehicles. To address this need, we will design and demonstrate Advanced Mission Display and Planning Tools (AMPT) to reduce the workload of re-planning and re-tasking teams of heterogeneous vehicles. These decision-support interfaces will use simple visual structures to convey complex behavior-shaping events that operators can intuitively perceive and efficiently respond to, thereby resulting in enhanced insight and direction of the planning tools. First, we will expand prior analyses of unmanned operations to characterize operators"need for observability and directability of automated planning tools. Second, we leverage this analysis to design: (1) ecological mission displays that enhance operator awareness of the relative efficacy of automated plans with respect to mission goals; and (2) advanced planning algorithms that incorporate both hard and soft constraints during mission re-planning and re-tasking. Finally, we will extend existing in-house planning algorithms, display tools, and simulation environments to rapidly prototype of AMPT mission display visualizations and planning component algorithms. 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 complex domains.