CHARLES RIVER ANALYTICS, INC. — Department of Defense STTR Phase I: AF19A-T001

Description

Intuitive mission displays and planning capabilities are needed to enhance pilot and operator situation awareness when teaming with next-generation autonomous vehicles in tactical operations. To address this, we will design and demonstrate Tactical Interfaces for Teaming with Autonomy (TITAN) to increase the shared awareness for manned/unmanned teams in distributed and complex communications environments. These decision-centered mission displays will use simple visual structures to convey complex behavior-shaping events that operators can intuitively perceive and proactively respond to in challenging, distributed, uncertain, and communications-limited environments, resulting in effective teaming with autonomous systems. First, we will expand prior analyses of unmanned operations to characterize operators’ needs for observability and directability in these environments. Second, we will leverage this analysis to design: (1) ecological mission displays that enhance an operator’s situation awareness and understanding of autonomous teammates across dynamic, distributed communications with respect to individual vehicle, mission, and environmental constraints; and (2) advanced behavior prediction and communication optimization methods in challenging communication environments. Finally, we will extend existing in-house display tools and simulation environments to rapidly prototype TITAN mission displays and component algorithms. We will use these prototypes to demonstrate and evaluate our approaches and explore the complexities of manned/unmanned teaming in tactical environments.