Adjustable Control for Enhanced Interoperability of Human-Autonomy Teaming Within ISR Operations

The development of autonomous vehicles such as Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) are becoming a major tool for air and information superiority in defence and threat anticipation. Human-Autonomy Teaming (HAT) systems are crucial for the success of team collaboration, trust and mission execution in command and control (C2) operations such as Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR). The present work focuses on understanding when and how control should be allocated to autonomous agents. Intelligent adaptive control methods between human and autonomous agents are introduced. The proposed method consists in developing a HAT system based on the co-active design framework. A prototype system was implemented and tested in a human-in-the-loop experiment involving a simulated ISR mission. Findings helped assess individual capacities and detect behavioural patterns for adaptive control. More specifically, it helped recommend the level of support and control to be allocated for each agent. Results focused on the human operator and helped gain insight about how task-allocation strategies could be implemented within a complex ISR operation by breaking it down into sub-tasks. A key outcome of this work to help augment team interoperability in C2 operations. This paper was originally presented at the NATO Science and Technology Organization Symposium (ICMCIS) organised by the Information Systems Technology (IST) Panel, IST-205-RSY - the ICMCIS, held in Koblenz, Germany, 23–24 April 2024.