Plenary Lecture

Human-Integrated Supervisory Control
of Remotely Piloted Vehicles



Professor S. Narayanan
Executive Director, Wright State Research Institute
& Professor and Chair Department of Biomedical, Industrial, and Human Factors Engineering
Wright State University, Dayton, OH 45435
USA
Email: s.narayanan@wright.edu

Abstract: In many complex systems, such as applications in nuclear power plants; emergency response situations, such as search and rescue missions; and in military domains, human decision makers are required to make critical decisions in a time-pressured environment. Typically, most of these applications are dynamic and uncertain and require humans making supervisory control decisions through monitoring, re-planning, troubleshooting, and control. Due to the critical nature of decision making, human operators are responsible for the safe and efficient operation of these applications. Human supervisory controllers with computerized processes must work together in achieving overall system objectives. Research on human-centered automation in aviation, satellite ground control, and nuclear power plant control has resulted in broad guidelines on system design involving human and computerized processes in supervisory control. However, problems such as increased human error, lack of situational awareness, and opacity from poorly automated systems remain, particularly in scenarios where human operators must make decisions in time-pressured planning. This talk will use human interaction with multiple remotely piloted vehicles as the domain and outline a modeling and simulation architecture for analysis of these systems from a human-centered perspective. Included in this presentation are results from an empirical evaluation focusing on decision support systems design and development.

 

Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Dr. Narayanan is Executive Director of the Wright State Research Institute and Professor and Chair in the Department of Biomedical, Industrial, and Human Factors Engineering at Wright State University. He holds a Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from Georgia Tech. Dr. Narayanan has executed over $7.5 million of collaborative research projects on interactive simulations, information analysis, systems analysis, and human computer interaction from a variety of sponsors including the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the human effectiveness directorate of the Air Force Research Laboratory, Ohio Board of Regents, Intel, Lexis-Nexis, and other industries. His research interests are in the area of modeling human cognition in context and designing interactive systems to aid humans in performing cognitively complex tasks such as planning, information retrieval and synthesis, and troubleshooting. His research has an interdisciplinary thrust with the following themes: cognition, computational representation, interactivity, and application. He has published over 75 technical articles and is Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, the International Journal of Modeling and Simulation, and Transactions of the Society for Computer Simulation. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Medicine and Biology in Engineering.