Enhanced Operator Situational Awareness for Multi-Unmanned Vehicle Teams

SoarTech proposes to research and design an intelligent, multi-vehicle operator control unit that we call Sapient. Sapient will monitor the mission and behavior of a team of heterogeneous UVs and 1. present the user with filtered, focused information about the mission, 2. detect and project important events and alert the user to them, 3. detect and reconcile with the user potential situation ambiguities, and 4. automate the presentation of critical 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 derived from game design. Computational SA will act as a surrogate user maintaining attention on the mission and sub-tasks so that the user doesn"t have to. When opportunities and issues are encountered, it will communicate SA to the operator via visualizations and other interface modes so that the operator can make the critical control decisions.