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Human factors in the guidance of uninhabited vehicles: oxymoron or tautology?

The potential of cognitive and co-operative automation

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Abstract

Today’s automation is typically tied into work processes as tools actively supporting the human operator in fulfilling certain well-defined sub-tasks. The human operator is in the role of the high-end decision component determining and supervising the work process. With emergent technology highly automated work systems can be beneficial on the one hand, but automation may as well cause problems on its own. A new way of introducing automation into work systems shall be advocated by this article overcoming the classical pitfalls of automation and simultaneously taking the benefit as wanted. This shall be achieved by so-called cognitive automation, i.e. providing human-like problem-solving, decision-making and knowledge processing capabilities to machines in order to obtain goal-directed behaviour and effective operator assistance. A key feature of cognitive automation is the ability to create its own comprehensive representation of the current situation and to provide reasonable action. By additionally providing full knowledge of the prime work objectives to the automation it will be enabled to co-operate with the human operator in supervision and decision tasks, then being intelligent machine assistants for the human operator in his work place. Such assistant systems understand the work objective and will be heading for the achievement of the overall desired work result. They will understand the situation (e.g. opportunities, conflicts) and actions of team members—whether humans or assistant systems—and will pursue goals for co-operation and co-ordination (e.g. task coverage, avoidance of redundancy or team member overcharge). On the other hand, cognitive automation can be emerged towards being highly automated intelligent agents in charge of certain supportive tasks to be performed in a semi-autonomous mode. These cognitive semi-autonomous systems and the cognitive assistants shall be denoted as the two faces of dual-mode cognitive automation (Onken and Schulte, in preparation).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universität der Bundeswehr München, 85577, Neubiberg, Germany

    Axel Schulte, Claudia Meitinger & Reiner Onken

Authors
  1. Axel Schulte
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  2. Claudia Meitinger
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  3. Reiner Onken
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Correspondence to Axel Schulte.

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Schulte, A., Meitinger, C. & Onken, R. Human factors in the guidance of uninhabited vehicles: oxymoron or tautology?. Cogn Tech Work 11, 71–86 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10111-008-0123-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10111-008-0123-2

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