Enabling human-autonomy teaming with multi-unmanned vehicle control interfaces

Human-autonomy teaming is essential for future military operations, but guidance on how to design controls and displays to support joint decision-making and task completion is scarce. Transportation planning experts, drawing from their design experience, recently compiled questions that they postulated would be useful to guide human-autonomy interaction designs for other domains. To explore their generalizability, these questions were employed as a framework for describing the human-autonomy teaming interfaces developed for an implemented prototype military multi-unmanned vehicle (UV) control station. This process demonstrated that the proposed questions indeed address pertinent UV control station requirements. Their “situation driver” questions are aligned with the station’s expanded play-based adaptable automation approach, whereby a wide spectrum of control from manual to fully autonomous can be flexibly applied across UVs/mission tasks to enable shared human-autonomy workload. Their questions regarding “visualizations and control mechanisms” would have likely led to the UV station’s design that features pictorial icons to present actionable concise information in an integrated manner and intuitively support calling UV management plays. Finally, the questions addressing autonomy’s “solution generation and presentation” are correlated to the prototype’s interfaces for presenting multiple courses of action and ongoing play status. Thus, the questions inspired by military airlift planning should also be useful for human-autonomy interface design for the UV command and control domain. Suggested enhancements to the question set are provided as well as detailed recommendations on research needed to extend the human-autonomy teaming interfaces to better support bi-directional communication and directability in more complex, collaborative UV missions.