Lessons Learned and Future Direction of a Teaming Interface for Unmanned Vehicle Tasks

Abstract

Having multiple operators requires aspects critical to teaming, such as coordination and team awareness, to be considered during system design. A Task Manager interface was developed that supports shared awareness across team members by summarizing the relative priority, recency, assignment, and completion status of mission tasks. While the original design provided information essential to the operator, evaluation results indicated that critical information needed to be more accessible. Primarily, important unmanned vehicle (UV) task details should be available at the higher level without the need to “drill down” into the task. Evaluation results informed a Task Manager redesign that does not remove any functionality but altered how information is represented. The goal of these modifications is to improve awareness for the UV operators and support more efficient teaming between operator/autonomy teammates. This new design will be evaluated in future research, and those results will then inform future designs using an iterative design and evaluation process.

Keywords: Teaming, Task Management, Unmanned Vehicles

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1002314