Team Performance Metrics for Command and Control of Unmanned Systems Navy SBIR FY2012.2 Sol No.: Navy SBIR FY2012.2 Topic No.: N122-137 Topic Title: Team Performance Metrics for Command and Control of Unmanned Systems Proposal No.: N122-137-0603 Firm: Pacific Science & Engineering Group, Inc. 9180 Brown Deer Road San Diego, California 92121-2238 Contact: Ronald Moore Phone: (858) 535-1661 Web Site: www.pacific-science.com Abstract: In today's world, unmanned vehicles play ever-increasing roles in the military, firefighting, deep-sea and space exploration, and border defense. There is often a one-to-one ratio between operator and these unmanned vehicles; in some systems, an entire team of humans is required to operate a single vehicle. The Navy's ambitious future vision of autonomous vehicles and sensors involves tens - even hundreds - of vehicles and sensors being supervised by a single individual or very small team. To achieve this radical shift will require innovative new methods of monitoring, managing, and coordinating these vehicles and sensors - and a significant change in the current concept of operations. Whereas today's unmanned vehicles or sensors serve primarily as a remote extension of their operators and have very little autonomy, tomorrow's autonomous vehicles and sensors will serve more as active, "thinking" members in a vast, distributed, multi-echelon "team" supervised and directed by a human(s). Measuring and optimizing the performance of such human/machine teams in real time will require new kinds of metrics and methods of measurement. This proposal outlines a plan for developing and validating the required metrics and methods by way of a new concept for structuring the data and information exchanged between human and machine. Benefits: The practical benefits include: 1) A richer understanding of the information requirements of different user roles in different situations for large scale UxV supervision. 2) Practical, content-based metrics for information and situation variables, such as information priority and pertinence and information uncertainty tailored to user roles and situations. 3) Application of the contextually-aware content-based metrics to allow real-time assessment of human/UxV team performance, and help evaluate situations and determine necessary information transactions in real-time throughout the UxV system. The scientific benefits include the development of contextually-aware content-based metrics that can be used to further the study of communication and information transaction in systems that require the supervision of large numbers of entities or nodes. The primary vector for commercialization is to market and transition UxV metrics to one of PSE's many industry partners, including UAV and UUV manufacturers, and the DoD acquisition community. Additionally, with regard to DoD acquisition, PSE's knowledge of human-systems integration (HSI) can be used to address HSI requirements associated with implementing UxV metrics throughout the acquisition process. In particular, PSE will work with ONR to apply the developed metrics to the target domain, the Joint Interagency Task Force, South (JIATF-S), via on-going projects. Return