SMART INFORMATION FLOW TECHNOLOGIES LLC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N162-126

Description

SIFT will partner with Katia Sycara and Michael Lewis to develop an Interface System for Human Interaction with Swarms (ISHIS), including a prototype user interface and a simulation and testbed to enable adaptation and experimental validation of its performance in multiple contexts. Our focus will be on human status awareness and commanding abilities to enable behavior shaping and swarm management for swarms of 100 to 1000 members performing Naval surface and subsurface missions in environments where communications (both human-swarm and intra-swarm) may be severely restricted, information uncertain and where swarm members may be lost. We will build on previously validated approaches to swarm and multi-UAV control to develop Human-Swarm Interactions (HSIs) to command tunable swarm shaping behaviors, while providing status-conveying interface components and decision aids for the operator to issue these commands in effective ways. We will also support novel conditional commanding of swarms, which is critical to many militarily useful swarm behaviors. In Phase 1, we will proceed through scenario selection and interaction requirements definition, to HSI design and experimental testbed, hypotheses and methodology definition and will complete a cognitive walkthrough of our proposed design and scenarios illustrating interaction coverage and acceptable performance time for human usability.