Collaborative and Shared Control of Unmanned Vehicle Systems

Technologies for Human-Robotic Interactions (HRI) currently are not designed for, and do not adequately support, dynamic teaming and Command & Control (C2) interaction paradigms in distributed, manned-unmanned teaming environments to a degree routinely exhibited by well-trained and experienced manned-manned operations or by highly autonomous hierarchical intelligent control systems. Interaction protocols do exist for highly trained collaborative teams or cooperative co-habitants in a purely manned environment. Interaction protocols also exist for highly autonomous systems employing a hierarchical intelligent control architecture capable of integrating distributed autonomy. However, the equivalent interaction protocols are not well defined and matured for human-robotic (manned-unmanned) for the collaborative teams and cooperative co-habitants cases. Our over-arching objectivefor this SBIR effort is to use our team’s expertise in human system integration and autonomous control to develop HRI protocols capable of achieving similar levels of integration between the manned-unmanned systems as currently exist between the manned-manned or unmanned-unmanned.