SBIR/STTR Award attributes
Intuitive mission displays and planning capabilities are needed to enhance pilot and operator situation awareness when teaming with next-generation autonomous vehicles in tactical operations. To address this, we designed and demonstrated the feasibility of Tactical Interfaces for Teaming with Autonomy (TITAN) under a Phase I effort. TITAN increases the shared awareness for manned/unmanned teams in distributed and complex communications environments. These decision-centered mission displays use simple visual structures to convey complex behavior-shaping events that operators can intuitively perceive and proactively respond to in challenging, distributed, uncertain, and communications-limited environments, resulting in effective teaming with autonomous systems. In Phase II, we propose to extend and evaluate TITAN. First, we will expand our analyses of unmanned operations to characterize operators’ needs for observability and directability in these environments. Second, we will leverage this analysis to extend the designs of our ecological mission displays that enhance an operator’s situation awareness and understanding of autonomous teammates across dynamic, distributed communications with respect to individual vehicle, mission, and environmental constraints. We will extend existing in-house display tools and simulation environments to rapidly prototype TITAN mission displays. We will use these prototypes to evaluate our approaches and explore the complexities of manned/unmanned teaming in tactical environments.
