Divya passes Thesis Proposal

11/11/2022: Divya Srivastava, 5th year Mechanical Engineering student, successfully proposed her PhD thesis entitled ‘Transparency and Operator Performance in Human-Autonomy Teams.’ Summary: Human-autonomy teams aim to leverage the different strengths of humans and autonomous systems respectively to exceed the individual capabilities of each through collaboration. Highly effective human teams develop and utilize a shared mental […]

CEC PhD Students Win 1st and 2nd Place Doctoral Doctoral Research Awards at ICHMS 2022

The 2022 IEEE International Conference on Human-Machine Systems (ICHMS), held in Orlando, Florida, conducted a Doctoral Research Award Competition (DAC) or doctoral research contributions. Contributions were ranked for both paper submissions and conference presentations by a conference review team. Two CEC Lab members won awards, Sarah Walsh (5th year Robotics PhD Candidate) and Divya Srivastava (5th year […]

Human-AI Interaction in Autonomous Aerial Vehicles

Looking 10-20 years into the future, in the rapidly advancing world of autonomous, special ops, cargo, and medevac aircraft, all of the basic aviation functions will likely be handled completely and competently by Al agents embedded within air vehicles. Under nominal conditions (and many basic off-nominal situations) the Al-controlled vehicle will operate autonomously and independently without input from onboard […]

Investigation of Critical Attributes for Transparency and Operator Performance in Human Autonomy Teaming (TOPHAT) for Intelligent Mission Planning

Teams tend to be high-performing when they have an accurate shared mental model. A shared mental model (SMM) is the understanding of the exterior world, as well as who within a team has both the ability to perform certain tasks as well as the responsibility to see that they are performed correctly. It incorporates understanding bout who […]

IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Impact of Missing Information and Strategy on Decision Making (Best Paper Award)

Performance Decision makers frequently encounter environments without perfect information, in which factors such as the distribution of missing information and estimates of missing information significantly impact decision accuracy and speed. This work presents an experiment which modifies an environment with missing information (total information, option imbalance, cue balance) and examines user estimates of the missing […]

IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, Cybernetics Presentation: Differentiating ‘Human in the Loop’ Decision Strategies

Recently, research by groups in academia, industry, and government has shifted toward the development of AI and machine learning tools to advise human decision-making in complex, dynamic problems. Within this collaborative environment, humans alone are burdened with the task of managing team strategy due to the AI-agent’s use of an unrealistic model of the human-agent’s […]

Real-time guidance algorithms for helicopter shipboard landing

Helicopter shipboard landing is one of the most challenging operations for pilots to execute owing to the random ship deck motion, turbulence due to airwake interactions, and poor visibility due to sea sprays, weather conditions and at night. Active research in this field has been focused on developing schemes to either autonomously pilot the vehicle […]

Impact of Shared Mental Models on Human-AI Interaction and Mission Effectiveness

Human teams are most effective when the members of the team utilize a shared mental model (SMM), meaning a shared perception of goals and actions through effective communication and an understanding of their fellow team members’ goals and likely methods. Currently humans and AI teams share no such model.  At best, humans working closely with […]