Natural Language Dialogue for Supervisory Control of Autonomous Ground Vehicles Navy SBIR FY2010.2 Sol No.: Navy SBIR FY2010.2 Topic No.: N102-177 Topic Title: Natural Language Dialogue for Supervisory Control of Autonomous Ground Vehicles Proposal No.: N102-177-0490 Firm: Infoscitex Corporation 303 Bear Hill Road Waltham, Massachusetts 02451-1016 Contact: Andrew DeCarlo Phone: (781) 890-1338 Web Site: www.infoscitex.com Abstract: As unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) gain prominence in Navy applications and across the DoD, solutions are needed to reduce the human operator's cognitive workload. Unburdening the human operator from all but the executive UGV control duties allows the human to focus on other duties, and therefore improves the human's situational awareness. On the other hand, techniques that totally unburden the human operator are impractical, resulting in heavy training burdens and high computational overhead. Even interfaces that allow the human to interact with the UGV in a natural way, through gestures and speech, use such constrained syntaxes that the interface increases the operator's cognitive workload. To meet the Navy's needs, Infoscitex (IST) is pleased to propose Unstructured Speech And Gesture Evaluation (USAGE) for Heads-up, Hands-free UGV Control. USAGE contains a robust human-machine interface that allows human operators to control UGVs naturally, without additional cognitive workload, and without reduction in situational awareness. Benefits: USAGE allows operation from unstructured speech input rather than structured speech, allowing a more natural user interface. USAGE also includes capabilities for complex gesture recognition in addition to simple gesture recognition, allowing more complex messages to be sent through gesture interface. USAGE is aware of the human operator's goals, beliefs, and perceptions in addition to its own, allowing better plan generation through abductive reasoning. USAGE also allows knowledge sharing of a wide variety of video data, state data, symbolic data, text, and speech. USAGE's structure is modular, allowing customization to meet a vast array of use cases and applications. USAGE has application to a wide range of DoD uses, such as unmanned surface vehicles, small unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) autonomous navigation, autonomous force protection, communications improvements, mapping and exploration, human presence detection, ISR robots, and UAV/UGV collaborative operations. USAGE also has related use in DHS, intelligence community, federal, state, and local law enforcement applications. These applications include border surveillance, urban surveillance, police pursuit, Coast Guard littoral rescue missions, Homeland Security disaster relief missions, and urban exploration. Commercial applications for USAGE technology include voice- and gesture- controlled manufacturing robots and surgical microrobots. The market for USAGE voice- and gesture-based interaction and planning includes human-machine interfaces for video games, virtual reality systems, information kiosks, automated answering services, and many other applications. Return