Human-Automation Collaboration in Dynamic Mission Planning: A Challenge Requiring an Ecological Approach

The US Navy is funding the development of advanced automation systems to plan and execute unmanned vehicles missions, pushing towards a higher level of autonomy for automated planning systems. With effective systems, the human could play a role of mission manager and automation systems could perform mission planning and execution tasks with limited human involvement. Evaluations of the automation systems currently under development are identifying critical conflicts between human operator expectations and automated planning results. This paper presents a model of this human-automation interaction system and summarizes the resulting system design effort. This model provides a theory explaining the source of conflict between human and automation, and predicts that an ecological approach to display design would reduce that conflict. Based on that prediction, the paper describes initial results of an ecological approach to system analysis and design, intended to improve human-automation interaction for these types of advanced automation systems.