Narrative monologue as a first step towards advanced mission debrief for AUV operator situational awareness

Present generation AUVs act as mobile sensor platforms, allowing post mission debriefs which require little more than an adequate expression of the collected data, and only basic requirements for mission planning. As the need and capability advances, autonomy will increase in turn, leading to more complex missions, which must be supported by more capable operator interfaces, both for post mission debrief and pre-mission verification, lest a deficit of trust form between the vehicles and their operators. We present Glaykos, a system designed to automatically create audio visual debriefs for missions carried out with both real and simulated vehicles, allowing it to act as a tool for both pre-mission verification and post mission debrief. A series of data transforms are applied to the domain information and mission logs from an AUV mission, resulting in the creation of an audio visual debrief whose structure is informed by principles of human computer interaction and narrative. The approach is tested for effectiveness and results of this are presented, showing that it better able to keep users informed when compared two other debriefing strategies, one of which mimics the current state of the art. Conclusions are drawn regarding the system's monologue based approach acting as a first step towards more complex and capable multimodal, dialogue based operator interfaces for autonomous systems.