Soldiers Understanding Agents

Army Capability Objective

Advanced Situation Awareness providing Soldiers better understanding of their intelligent agent teammates in order to establish shared mental models for effective and cooperative team decision-making. Enhanced transparency makes agent performance more understandable and predictable. We expect this to increase Soldier trust sufficient to support teaming with future intelligent agents that emulates, perhaps even exceeds, the capabilities of currently effective Soldier-to-Soldier teams.

Fundamental ENABLING SCIENCE

Efforts in this area focus on characterizing, modeling, and predicting the individualized informational needs of Soldiers in the service of developing better methods to optimize the situation awareness needed to support successful mission execution at the team-level. Basic science in this area focuses on understanding the processes underlying functional human states that are often identified with constructs such as situation awareness, trust, and cohesion in order to improve Soldier-agent information exchange. Applied science realizes these constructs through innovative, transparent interface technologies that use multiple human sensory-perceptual channels (e.g., vision, touch, hearing) to support the bi-directional communication needed for adaptive and collaborative team performance. Our long term goals are to enhance the overall performance of diverse and mixed human-autonomy teams by increasing their capabilities to respond to changing environments and to each other.