Spatial dialog for space system autonomy

Future space operations will increasingly demand cooperation between humans and autonomous space systems such as robots, observer satellites, and distributed components. Human team members use a combination of gestures, gaze, posture, deictic references and speech to communicate effectively. When a human team collaborates on a given task, they discuss the task, create a plan and then review this plan prior to execution to ensure success. This is exactly the process we envision for effective human-autonomous agent collaborative teamwork. Visual spatial information is a common reference for increased shared situation awareness between humans and autonomous systems. We use a spatial dialog approach to enable multiple humans to naturally and effectively communicate and work with multiple autonomous space systems. With this in mind, we have created a prototype spatial dialog system to support teamwork between humans and autonomous robotic agents. We combine augmented reality gesture interaction and visualization with speech to realize a spatial dialog capability. This paper describes our prototype, general approach, and related issues for team-oriented spatial dialog interaction with autonomous space systems.