Who Needs an Operator When the Robot is Autonomous? The Challenges and Advantages of Robots as Team Members

Abstract

Unmanned air and ground systems are an integral part of current and future military operations. Robotic control is currently a continuous and cognitively demanding task. More autonomous robotic systems with diverse roles, tasks, and operating requirements are being designed to exploit future battle spaces. The chapter discusses the challenges of robotics on soldier performance and solutions to maximize the benefits of the game-changing technology. It also discusses human robot interaction (HRI) in terms of three dimensions: level of automation, specialized interfaces for supervisory control, and soldier-robot teaming. The chapter describes the main issues of automation and the implications of the operator moving from manual to supervisory control, multitasking for workload issues, and types of interfaces and their impact on the mentioned dimensions. There are four general operational modes for unmanned systems: remote control, teleoperation, semi-autonomous, and fully autonomous. The difference between these modes is the level of autonomy on the unmanned system.