The United States Department of Defense (DOD) is making significant investment in military robotics, including unmanned air vehicles (UAV) and ground vehicles (UAG). This includes both improved robotic hardware and instrumentation, and software for supervising robotic operations. Similar to NASA, military robotic operations often are remote and, though not subject to the significant communication delays encountered in space, they are affected by communication quality and availability issues. Thus remote supervision of military robots should benefit from the proposed technology for improved group awareness of multiple robots and detection of conflicts among concurrent robotic operations. Additionally the proposed approach integrating assistive agents with evaluator agents has potential as a testbed for simulating hybrid multi-agent operations for the military. NASA conducts analog robotic field tests to evaluate new robotic technology and to simulate remote robotic operations. The Exploration Program typically conducts annual field tests, such as the recent tests at Black Point Lava Flow, AZ, in 2009. The proposed assistive agent technology would have direct application to such field tests, including the algorithms for situation awareness in the presence of communication delay. The results of investigating the detection of plan and safety threats are needed for remote ground control. The integration of assistive agents with evaluator agents will support assessing planned work practice for these field tests (in the form of operations protocols) as well as evaluating observed work practice during the field test. At the end of Phase II the integrated agent architecture would provide a testbed for studying future multi-agent operations at NASA as well as a prototype of situation awareness technology for such operations.
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