On Efficient Cooperative Strategies between UAVs and Humans in a Dynamic Environment

In this paper, we consider an automation support system aiming at facilitating ecient cooperation between unmanned vehicles (UAVs) and remotely located human operators, in a dynamically-changing environment. In particular, we consider the following problem. A number of UAVs must visit and service (e.g., classify) targets that are generated according to a spatio-temporal Poisson process, uniformly in a convex, compact region of the plane. The vehicles can plan their motion autonomously. However, once a vehicle is in the proximity of a target location, it requires assistance from a human to nish the service at that location. The system objective is to minimize the expected waiting time between the appearance of a target, and the time of completion of its service. We model the performance of the human operators to vary with its utilization factor and propose several coordination strategies for joint target assignments for the humans and the UAVs.