Multi-vehicle OCU for Control and Awareness (MOCA)

This project will develop an operator control unit (OCU) which is capable of simultaneously controlling a heterogeneous mix of autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles, both land and air, with varying capabilities, and while avoiding operator overload. Current control units suffer from three distinct flaws. 1) The user interface is vehicle centric, where status information and commands are specific to one vehicle at a time. Usually this constrains a single operator to control one or maybe a few assets from a single station, preventing the type of force multiplication required for any other mission than single vehicle tele-operation. 2) Also, they usually overload the operator with too much information and too many controls to make quick mission-level decisions, or to even accurately understand the mission state, both at the global and the situational awareness levels. 3) Furthermore, the status information and controls are not contextually applicable to the task being executed. The proposed OCU will allow for a group of heterogeneous land/air/sea platforms to connect through an open architecture, while using various interface techniques to mitigate operator overload. The result will be a control unit which allows for fast, mission-level decisions with the best contextually applicable knowledge available at any given time.