Instructor's Associate for Rating Aircrew Teamwork

Effective aircrew teamwork is critical for insuring mission success and reducing accidents. There is a requirement for a tool that helps aircrew trainers conduct standardized evaluations of teamwork performance. In the proposed research, a portable Instructor's Associate will be designed and constructed to help standardize the measurement process and provide assistance to the instructor. A variety of optional user interfaces will be available. Speech synthesis can be used to solicit ratings and other input from the instructor. Speech recognition can be used both to control sequencesand store an instructor's prompted and unsolicited comments in a standard database for later analysis. An artificial intelligence component will monitor instructor ratings and provide queries or prompts when unusual patterns are detected. A GUI authoring system will allow intuitive creation and modification of flight or simulator scenarios. In Phase I, an aircrew teamwork scenario will be selected and a task analysis conducted. Functional characteristics of the system will be identified and used to select the hardware and software features. A prototype system will be constructed and demonstrated to show feasibility. The Phase II system will be extended to provide a more generic tool for a variety of military and civilian applications.