Situation Awareness in Hri with Collaborating Remotely Piloted Vehicles

In future Army operations, soldiers may be required to remotely operate multiple robotic vehicles and participate in collaborative tasks with these systems. The ability to acquire and maintain situation awareness in tasking and controlling robots will be critical to human-robot interaction. Understanding the critical information requirements for robotics tasks will be important, particularly when operators must work with multiple systems across aerial and ground platforms, and must perform under what will likely be varying levels of system autonomy. Here, we examine SA needs in the context of a collaborative military task involving deployment of a single UAV that is coordinating with multiple UGVs to identify “safe lanes” for advancing troops. Cognitive task analysis was conducted for the task, along with an examination of potential function allocations that may require operator multi-tasking and frequent task switching. Issues in developing and maintaining situation awareness are discussed.