The Navy and Marine Corps are currently investing in a variety of heterogeneous naval unmanned systems to be operated from small host platforms. In many cases, significant limitations exist on the manning available for these systems
in terms of both numbers and skill types. Increasing the level of automation can have a significant impact on reducing manning requirements, but despite advances in autonomous control technologies, mission management often still requires a human’s cognitive skills, judgment, decision-making and tactical understanding.
The Office of Naval Research (ONR) Human Robotic Interaction Program is investiing in basic research in areas such as flexible, robust and scalable human-robot teams in dynamic and uncertain environments integration of cognitive models, action schemes and statistical estimation. ONR is also focused on integrating behavior models and distributed control; assigning tasks with different, potentially incompatible goals, and enabling unmanned vehicles to execute them; robust, intuitive, multimodal (e.g., natural language, gestures, pointers, etc.) human-robot dialogue systems; and learning from instruction during task execution.
Applied research efforts are focused on the human interface technology to support small teams of co-located and distributed users in managing larger numbers of unmanned systems and sharing unmanned systems resources, autonomy, decision aids and situational awareness tools to support collaborative decision-making among teams of operators and unmanned systems, mixed-initiative interfaces, and integrating large amounts of data from multiple sources into unmanned system mission displays.
This research could equip robot sentries to conduct dangerous missions while minimizing human risk, such as explosive ordnance disposal, operating in chemical, biological and nuclear (CBN) conditions, or searching for concealed CBN items. ONRs research could also greatly reduce manning requirements for forward-deployed units that were operating unmanned and/or autonomous systems.