Page 30 - Innovations in Intelligent Machines

18 M.L. Cummings et al.
navigation loop was only partially automated. As will be discussed in more
detail next, the mission management autonomy was varied as an independent
facto in the experiment.

Levels of Autonomy. Recognizing that the level of autonomy introduced
in the mission/payload management control loop can significantly impact an
operator’s ability to control multiple vehicles, and thus neglect, interaction,
and wait times, we developed four increasing levels of decision support for
the temporal management of the four UAVs: Manual, Passive, Active, and
Super-active, which loosely correlate to the Sheridan and Verplank Levels
[14] of 1, 2, 4, 6 (shown in Table 1). The manual level of decision support
(Fig. 1a) presents all required mission planning information in a text-based
table format. It essentially provides tabular data such as waypoints, expected
time on targets, etc., with no automated decision support. It is representative
of air tasking orders that are in use by military personnel today.
The passive LOA (Fig. 4b) represents an intermediate mission manage-
ment LOA in that it provides operators with a color-coded timeline for the
expected mission assignments 15 minutes in the future. With this visual rep-
resentation, recognizing vehicle states with regard to the current schedule is
perceptually-based, allowing users to visually compare the relative location of
display elements instead of requiring individual parameter searches such as
what occurs in the manual condition.
The active LOA (Fig. 4c) uses the same horizontal timeline format as the
passive automation level, but provides intelligent aiding. In the active version,
an algorithm searches for periods of time in the schedule that it predicts
will cause high workload for the operator, directing the operator’s attention

Table 1. Levels of Automation
Automation Level Automation Description
1 The computer offers no assistance: human
must take all decision and actions.
2 The computer offers a complete set of
decision/action alternatives, or
3 Narrows the selection down to a few, or
4 Suggests one alternative, and
5 Executes that suggestion if the human
approves, or
6 Allows the human a restricted time to veto
before automatic execution, or
7 Executes automatically, then necessarily
informs humans, and
8 Informs the human only if asked, or
9 Informs the human only if it, the computer,
decides to.
10 The computer decides everything and acts
autonomously, ignoring the human.