SBIR-STTR Award

Swarming systems are an emerging technology offering new offensive and defensive capabilities, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness for military and commercial unmanned systems. Swarm communication limitations, emergent behaviors, decentralized control, and control of vehicle groups present challenges for human operators interacting with swarms and for the design of swarm systems and user interfaces. In this SBIR, Pacific Science & Engineering (PSE) is addressing these issues by identifying the key human cognitive and perceptual challenges in swarm operations, and engaging in systematic user interface design to develop a Human Interaction & Visualization Environment (HIVE) for Swarms that specifically mitigates those challenges. The HIVE interfaces will integrate concepts and research from ongoing unmanned vehicle control system interface and autonomy efforts, to leverage relevant work and align with development efforts for transition.

Benefit:
HIVEs user-centered interface concepts will enable human operators to effectively manage future operational swarms, and will be designed to scale up from and down to multi-vehicle control interfaces being developed and fielded in todays systems, aligning with DoD investments in common, standardized, and scalable control systems and interfaces. Given the potential for widespread use of swarming systems, the HIVE concepts have significant commercial value in Government (DoD and other agencies) and commercial sectors.

Keywords:
swarming systems, swarming systems, Human-swarm interface, collaborative autonomy, User Interface

Swarming systems are an emerging technology offering new offensive and defensive capabilities, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness for military and commercial unmanned systems. Swarm communication limitations, emergent behaviors, decentralized control, and control of vehicle groups present challenges for human operators interacting with swarms and for the design of swarm systems and user interfaces. In this SBIR, Pacific Science & Engineering (PSE) is addressing these issues by identifying the key human cognitive and perceptual challenges in swarm operations, and engaging in systematic user interface design to develop a Human Interaction & Visualization Environment (HIVE) for Swarms that specifically mitigates those challenges. The HIVE interfaces will integrate concepts and research from ongoing unmanned vehicle control system interface and autonomy efforts, to leverage relevant work and align with development efforts for transition. HIVEs user-centered interface concepts will enable human operators to effectively manage future operational swarms, and will be designed to scale up from and down to multi-vehicle control interfaces being developed and fielded in todays systems, aligning with DoD investments in common, standardized, and scalable control systems and interfaces. Given the potential for widespread use of swarming systems, the HIVE concepts have significant commercial value in Government (DoD and other agencies) and commercial sectors.

Benefit:
Swarms provide several operational benefits to U.S. Navy and Marine Corps missions. For MCM, in particular, swarms act as a force multiplier, providing the potential for faster mission completion times, helping to offload time-consuming and tedious search and detection tasks. For swarming systems to provide this utility to the warfighter, they must be worked appropriately into operations, and their capabilities and status must be effectively conveyed to operators. The HIVE UIs developed in this SBIR will provide the critical bridge between human operators and swarming systems to allow them to effectively collaborate in the operational environments that these systems will be operated within.

Keywords:
collaborative autonomy, swarming systems, Human-swarm interface, User Interface