Natural Language Dialogue for Supervisory Control of Autonomous Ground Vehicles

As unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) gain prominence in Navy applications and across the DoD, solutions are needed to reduce the human operator"s cognitive workload. Unburdening the human operator from all but the executive UGV control duties allows the human to focus on other duties, and therefore improves the human"s situational awareness. On the other hand, techniques that totally unburden the human operator are impractical, resulting in heavy training burdens and high computational overhead. Even interfaces that allow the human to interact with the UGV in a natural way, through gestures and speech, use such constrained syntaxes that the interface increases the operator"s cognitive workload. To meet the Navy"s needs, Infoscitex (IST) is pleased to propose Unstructured Speech And Gesture Evaluation (USAGE) for Heads-up, Hands-free UGV Control. USAGE contains a robust human-machine interface that allows human operators to control UGVs naturally, without additional cognitive workload, and without reduction in situational awareness.