Siva BandaDirector, Control Science Center of Excellence

Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL)

Behavior of Systems with Humans and

Unmanned Vehicles

MURI KickoffPrinceton University13 September 2007

Systems with Humans and Unmanned Vehicles

Objective:

Develop new methods of capturing, modeling, representation, and understanding of human behavior and performance in military tactical scenarios with semi-autonomous vehicles

Impact:

Only by capturing and understanding the complexity of human dynamics in tactical situations can the full potential of semi-autonomous vehicles be realized

Behavioral Issues Affecting Human-Aided Autonomy

Human Issues as an individual:

workload, fatigue, belief systems, preconceived notions, incomplete information, inability to allow for erroneous data, inattention, boredom, training, not accepting data, arrogance, inability to consider the negative consequences of decisions, etc

Human Issues as a member of an organization:

cultural norms, pressure to conform, information compartmentalization, lines of authority, lines of responsibility, punishment, social acceptance, inability to speak truth to power, etc

Avoid Tragically Bad Decisions

Issues at Human-Machine Team Level

Human- Mental model of machines

Machines- Model of human

Over confidence in questionable information

Issues• bad model (wrong) • coupling (degree & number)• partial information (state & intent)• uncertainty (un-forseen events, improbable events, risk)

Issues at Organizational Level

HQAir Traffic Control COMM

Analysts Weapons

VideoRequests

VideoRequests

GroundOps

• who knows who

• who knows what

• who does what

Men/Machines that are aware of their limitationsGOAL

Closing thoughts

• Lack of unified engineering-fidelity analysis, design, and modeling & simulation tools

• May need team: decision & control theory, cognitive psychology, social psychology, organizational behavior, autonomous control, operations research, computer science, and others

• The role of unmanned vehicles (in all shapes and sizes) is expected to increase in air, land, space and water domains.

This MURI is absolutely essential to move autonomous control field to a quantum step forward