PACIFIC SCIENCE & ENGINEERING GROUP, INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: In today"s world, unmanned vehicles play ever-increasing roles in the military, firef

Description

In today"s world, unmanned vehicles play ever-increasing roles in the military, firefighting, deep-sea and space exploration, and border defense. There is often a one-to-one ratio between operator and these unmanned vehicles; in some systems, an entire team of humans is required to operate a single vehicle. The Navy"s ambitious future vision of autonomous vehicles and sensors involves tens even hundreds of vehicles and sensors being supervised by a single individual or very small team. To achieve this radical shift will require innovative new methods of monitoring, managing, and coordinating these vehicles and sensors and a significant change in the current concept of operations. Whereas today"s unmanned vehicles or sensors serve primarily as a remote extension of their operators and have very little autonomy, tomorrow"s autonomous vehicles and sensors will serve more as active,"thinking"members in a vast, distributed, multi-echelon"team"supervised and directed by a human(s). Measuring and optimizing the performance of such human/machine teams in real time will require new kinds of metrics and methods of measurement. This proposal outlines a plan for developing and validating the required metrics and methods by way of a new concept for structuring the data and information exchanged between human and machine.