Flexible and Complemental Human-Automation Collaborative Architecture for Mission Planning

Mission planning system is a classical Human-Automation Collaborative system that involves the integration of human decision making and an automated system. During developing such a collaborative system, the question often arises as to where, when, and how much humans and automation should be in the decision-making loop. Future envisioned mission planning system will be carried out in more complex and dynamic environments. This question mentioned above is becoming more and more critical in defining efficient and effective mission planning system architectures. However, little progress has been made in solving it effectively. This paper elaborates our experience during our efforts to solve this question and presents a Flexible and Complemental Human-Automation Collaborative architecture. In this architecture, there are four phases: division, allocation, process, and flexible collaboration and complementation. This architecture can balance role and function allocation across humans and automation in some degree. In addition, we also apply it to Rapidly exploring Random Tree algorithm for path planning to check its effectiveness.