scholarly journals Team Coordination of Team Situation Awareness in Human-Autonomy Teaming

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 146-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mustafa Demir ◽  
Nathan J. McNeese ◽  
Manrong She ◽  
Nancy J. Cooke
Keyword(s):  
Situation Awareness ◽  
Task Environment ◽  
Team Cognition ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Team Interaction ◽  
Remotely Piloted Aircraft ◽  
Human Autonomy ◽  
Team Situation Awareness ◽  
The Right ◽  
Pushing And Pulling

Project Overview Team Situation Awareness (TSA), which is a part of team cognition, is a critical factor that influences team effectiveness. It can be defined as getting the right information from the right person within the right amount of time, in order to overcome an unexpected event (Gorman, Cooke, Pederson, Connor, & DeJoode, 2005). TSA is developed and maintained through team interactions, allowing for the measurement of TSA based on team interaction (Cooke & Gorman, 2009). In the current study, a specific measure, Coordinated Awareness of Situation by Teams (CAST) is used (Cooke & Gorman, 2009). CAST evaluates the effectiveness and efficiency of team interaction under “roadblock” scenarios (Gorman, Cooke, & Winner, 2006). These roadblocks represent novel situations in the task and require effective team communication and coordination. Team members must assess the situation according to their own specialized role and/or resources and coordinate with other team members to overcome each separate roadblock. In this task, effective communication refers to team anticipation. That is, each team member needs to anticipate each other’s needs by pushing information rather than pulling information during the task (Demir, McNeese, & Cooke, 2017). In this study, we examined how pushing and pulling information, and CAST were associated with Team Situation Awareness (TSA) in both Human-Autonomy (HAT) and all-human teams in simulated Remotely Piloted Aircraft System (RPAS) task environment. In this research, we integrated the synthetic agent to the Cognitive Engineering Research on Team Tasks Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems - Synthetic Task Environment (CERTT-RPAS-STE) which was designed to be both a flexible research platform and a realistic task environment with a view to researching team performance and interaction-based measures of team cognition. In the simulated CERTT testbed, there are three heterogeneous teammates who need to take good photos of each target waypoint by communicating via text-chat: (1) the navigator who creates a dynamic flight plan and provides information about the waypoints, the RPA’s airspeed, and altitude restrictions to the pilot; (2) the pilot, who controls the RPA’s heading, altitude, and airspeed, and negotiates with the photographer in order to take a good photo; and (3) the photographer, who monitors sensor equipment in order to take photographs of target waypoints and sends feedback to the other team members about the quality of the photo. This project aimed to understand how team behaviors and team performance differed between HATs and all-human teams in RPAS operations: (1) the synthetic condition—the pilot role was given to the synthetic teammate, which was an ACT-R based cognitive model (which had a limited interaction ability, see Ball et al., 2010; Demir et al., 2015); (2) the control condition—the pilot was a randomly selected human participant, just like the other two participants; and (3) the experimenter condition—one of the experimenters served as an expert pilot. Experimenter condition utilized a Wizard of Oz paradigm in which a trained experimenter (located in a separate room) used a script to imitate a synthetic teammate and communicated with participants in limited communication behaviors but pushing and pulling information in a timely manner (robust coordination). Method There were 30 teams (10 for each condition): control teams consisted of three participants randomly assigned to each role; synthetic and experimenter teams included two participants randomly assigned to the navigator and photographer roles. The experiment took place over five 40-minute missions, and the goal was to take as many “good” photos of ground targets as possible while avoiding alarms and rule violations. During each mission, teams were presented with “roadblocks” by the introduction of a new, ad hoc target waypoint. We collected several measures, but we focused on: the proportion of roadblocks overcome per mission as an outcome measure of TSA; the CAST which is a coordination sequence of team interaction across the team members (i.e. which team members share with team members their experience during the roadblock); and verbal behaviors such as pushing and pulling information. Results and discussion In this team task, effective teamwork involves anticipating the needs of teammates, which in turn means pushing information before it is requested. However, in addition to anticipation, effective coordination is also needed during roadblocks. HATs demonstrated significantly lower levels of CAST than all-human teams. These results indicate that HATs’ lack of anticipation and coordination resulted in poorer TSA performance. These findings help HATs to grow its coordination and communication methodologies. Finally, future studies might examine the relationships highlighted in this study via nonlinear measures in terms of team stability and flexibility based on their communication and coordination patterns during the novel events. HAT is here to stay but improvements to human-machine interactions must continue if we are to improve team effectiveness.

Team Situation Awareness in Human-Autonomy Teaming: A Systems Level Approach

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Grimm ◽  
Mustafa Demir ◽  
Jamie C. Gorman ◽  
Nancy J. Cooke
Keyword(s):  
Team Performance ◽  
Situation Awareness ◽  
Information Entropy ◽  
Timely Manner ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Dynamic Task ◽  
Remotely Piloted Aircraft ◽  
Human Autonomy ◽  
Team Situation Awareness ◽  
Communication Control

Project overview. The current study focuses on analyzing team flexibility by measuring entropy (where higher values correspond to system reorganization and lower values correspond to more stable system organization) across all-human teams and Human-Autonomy Teams (HAT). We analyzed teams in the context of a fully-fledged synthetic agent that acts as a pilot for a three-agent Remotely Piloted Aircraft System (RPAS) ground crew. The synthetic agent must be able to communicate and coordinate with human teammates in a constructive and timely manner to be effective. This study involved three heterogeneous team members who had to take photographs of target waypoints and communicate via a text-based communication system. The three team members’ roles were: 1) navigator provides information about flight plan with speed and altitude restrictions at each waypoint; 2) pilot adjusts altitude and airspeed to control the Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA), and negotiates with the photographer about the current altitude and airspeed to take good photos for the targets; and 3) photographer screens camera settings, and sends feedback to other team members regarding the target photograph status. The three conditions differed based on the manipulation of the pilot role: 1) Synthetic – the pilot was the synthetic agent, 2) Control – the pilot was a randomly assigned participant, and 3) Experimenter – the pilot was a well-trained experimenter who focused on sending and receiving information in a timely manner. The goal of this study is to examine how overall RPAS flexibility across HATs and all-human teams are associated with Team Situation Awareness (TSA). Method. There were 30 teams (10-teams per condition): control teams consisted of three participants randomly assigned to each role; synthetic and experimenter teams included two participants randomly assigned to the navigator and photographer roles. The experiment took place over five 40-minute missions, and the goal was to take as many “good” photos of ground targets as possible while avoiding alarms and rule violations. We obtained several measures, including mission and target level team performance scores, team process measures (situation awareness, process ratings, communication and coordination), and other measures (teamwork knowledge, workload, and demographics). We first estimated amount of system reorganization of the RPAS via an information entropy measure, i.e., the number of arrangements the system occupied over a given period of time (Shannon & Weaver, 1975). Based on information entropy, we defined four layers to represent the RPAS (Gorman, Demir, Cooke, & Grimm, In Review): 1) communications - the chat-based communication among team members; 2) vehicle - the RPA itself, e.g., speed, altitude; 3) control - interface between the RPA and the user; and system - the overall activity of the sub-layers. Then, we looked at the relationship between layers and TSA, which was based on successfully overcoming and completing ad hoc embedded target waypoints. Results and conclusion. Overall, the experimenter teams adapted to more roadblocks than the synthetic teams, who were equivalent to control teams (Demir, McNeese, & Cooke, 2016). The findings indicate that: 1) synthetic teams demonstrated rigid systems level activity, which consisted of less reorganization of communication, control and vehicle layers as conditions changed, which also resulted in less adaptation to roadblocks; 2) control teams demonstrated less communication reorganization, but more control and vehicle reorganization, which also resulted in less adaptation to roadblocks; and 3) experimenter teams demonstrated more reorganization across communication, control and vehicle layers, which resulted in better adaptation to roadblocks. Thus, the ability of a system to reorganize across human and technical layers as situations change is needed to adapt to novel conditions of team performance in a dynamic task

Exploring Measures of Team Knowledge

1998 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 215-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy J. Cooke ◽  
Rene'e Stout ◽  
Krisela Rivera ◽  
Eduardo Salas
Keyword(s):  
Team Performance ◽  
Situation Awareness ◽  
Relevant Information ◽  
Team Cognition ◽  
Unique Role ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Team Situation Awareness ◽  
Pathfinder Network ◽  
Knowledge Similarity ◽  
Share Information

Team cognition is more than the aggregate cognition of team members. It is an emerging feature, worthy of study in its own right. In this paper we investigate potential metrics of team knowledge in the context of a broader exploratory study on measures of team knowledge, performance, and situation awareness. Team members assumed different roles in a three-person synthetic task in which they were presented with unique role-relevant information. Successful accomplishment of team objectives required team members to share information. The focus of this paper is on one of several measures collected which required judgments of pairwise relatedness ratings for mission-relevant terms. These data were submitted to Pathfinder network scaling and used to derive three metrics of team knowledge: knowledge accuracy, interpositional knowledge, and knowledge similarity. The metrics revealed different perspectives on team knowledge and were generally predictive of team performance and team situation awareness.

Addressing Limitations of the Measurement of Team Cognition

2002 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 403-407 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Cooke ◽  
Preston A. Kiekel ◽  
Brian Bell ◽  
Eduardo Salas
Keyword(s):  
Team Performance ◽  
Situation Awareness ◽  
Team Cognition ◽  
Team Process ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Individual Cognition ◽  
Team Situation Awareness ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Heterogeneous Knowledge

Team cognition is more than the sum of the cognition of the individual team members. Instead, it emerges from the interplay of individual cognition and team process behaviors. Team cognition has been implicated as a major factor underlying team performance and thus, its measurement is critical for team training and design. Measures of team cognition, however, are limited in a number of ways. For instance, measures are taken at an individual level and aggregated, rather than pursuing data collection at the more holistic level of the team. Further, measures do not capture the heterogeneous knowledge backgrounds of team members. We have begun to address these and other limitations by developing new measures and applying them in four studies of team performance in military synthetic task environments. We highlight the results of these studies, which support the validity of our measures of taskwork knowledge, teamwork knowledge, and team situation awareness.

Coordinated Awareness of Situation by Teams (CAST): Measuring Team Situation Awareness of a Communication Glitch

2005 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 274-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jamie C. Gorman ◽  
Nancy J. Cooke ◽  
Harry K. Pederson ◽  
O. Connor Olena ◽  
Janie A. DeJoode
Keyword(s):  
Situation Awareness ◽  
Communication Channel ◽  
Experimental Results ◽  
Team Coordination ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Knowledge Based ◽  
Unmanned Air Vehicle ◽  
Air Vehicle ◽  
Low Dimension ◽  
Team Situation Awareness

A coordination-based measure of team situation awareness is presented and contrasted with knowledge-based measurement. The measure is applied to team awareness of a communication channel failure (glitch) during a simulated unmanned air vehicle reconnaissance experiment. Experimental results are reported, including the findings that not all team members should be identically aware of the glitch and that appropriate levels of coordination are an important precursor of team situation awareness. The results are discussed in terms of the application of coordination metrics to support the understanding of team situation awareness. The use of team coordination as a low-dimension variable of team functionality is scalable over a variety of team sizes and expertise distributions.

Measuring Shared and Team Situation Awareness of Emergency Decision Makers

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasir Javed ◽  
Tony Norris
Keyword(s):  
Situation Awareness ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Systems Design ◽  
Optimal Decision ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Decision Performance ◽  
Emergency Managers ◽  
Team Situation Awareness ◽  
Optimal Decision Making ◽  
Emergency Decision

Large scale emergencies are usually responded to by a team of emergency managers or a number of sub teams. Team coordination has attracted considerable research interest, especially from the cognitive, human factors, and ergonomic aspects because the shared situation awareness (SSA) and team situation awareness (TSA) of team members is critical for optimal decision making. This paper describes the development of an information system (SAVER) based on SSA and TSA oriented systems design. Validation and evaluation of the implemented design shows that decision performance is improved by the SAVER system.

Team situation awareness within the context of human-autonomy teaming

2017 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 3-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mustafa Demir ◽  
Nathan J. McNeese ◽  
Nancy J. Cooke
Keyword(s):  
Situation Awareness ◽  
Human Autonomy ◽  
Team Situation Awareness

Team Situation Awareness and Conflict: A Study of Human–Machine Teaming

2021 ◽  
pp. 155534342110173
Author(s):  
Nathan J. McNeese ◽  
Mustafa Demir ◽  
Nancy J. Cooke ◽  
Manrong She
Keyword(s):  
Situation Awareness ◽  
The Other ◽  
Agent Based ◽  
Team Conflict ◽  
Remotely Piloted Aircraft ◽  
Team Situation Awareness ◽  
Remotely Piloted Aircraft System ◽  
Aircraft System ◽  
Over Time

This article focuses on two fundamental human–human teamwork behaviors and seeks to understand them better in human–machine teams. Specifically, team situation awareness (TSA) and team conflict are examined in human–machine teams. There is a significant need to identify how TSA and team conflict occur during human–machine teaming, in addition to how they impact each other. In this work, we present an experiment aimed at understanding TSA and team conflict in the context of human–machine teaming in a remotely piloted aircraft system (RPAS). Three conditions were tested: (1) control: teams consisted of all humans; (2) synthetic: teams consisted of the pilot role being occupied by a computational agent based on ACT-R architecture that employed AI capabilities, with all other team roles being humans; and (3) experimenter: an experimenter playing the role of the pilot as a highly effective computational agent, with the other roles being humans. The results indicate that TSA improved over time in synthetic teams, improved and then stabilized over time in experimenter teams, and did not improve in control teams. In addition, results show that control teams had the most team conflict. Finally, in the control condition, team conflict negatively impacts TSA.

Improving Teams' Interpositional Knowledge Through Cross Training

2000 ◽  
Vol 44 (11) ◽  
pp. 390-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy J. Cooke ◽  
Janis A. Cannon-Bowers ◽  
Preston A. Kiekel ◽  
Krisela Rivera ◽  
Rene'e J. Stout ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Team Performance ◽  
Situation Awareness ◽  
Training Condition ◽  
Team Process ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Weak Support ◽  
Cross Training ◽  
Team Situation Awareness ◽  
Training Team ◽  
Traditional Manner

Recent investigations of team training have demonstrated advantages of cross training team members in the positions of other team members. Such benefits have been attributed to increases in interpositional knowledge. In an attempt to reduce the time demands of cross training, a conceptual cross-training condition that targeted teamwork knowledge was compared to traditional full cross-training and two control conditions. Three-person teams were assigned to a training condition and participated in two synthetic helicopter missions. Outcomes, team process behaviors, team situation awareness, taskwork knowledge, and teamwork knowledge were measured. Results indicated weak support for the benefits of full cross-training on team performance, yet minimal support for conceptual cross-training. Further, teams cross-trained in the traditional manner acquired more teamwork and taskwork interpositional knowledge than teams in any other condition. Both types of interpositional knowledge were correlated with team performance.

Team Interaction Strategies for Human–Autonomy Teaming in Next Generation Combat Vehicles

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-81
Author(s):  
Glenn J. Lematta ◽  
Craig J. Johnson ◽  
Eric Holder ◽  
Lixiao Huang ◽  
Shawaiz A. Bhatti ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Intelligent Agents ◽  
Team Effectiveness ◽  
Next Generation ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Team Interaction ◽  
Human Autonomy ◽  
Working Together ◽  
Common Goals ◽  
Contextual Domain ◽  
Future Work

The current study focuses on improving team effectiveness in Next Generation Combat Vehicles (NGCVs) that combine humans, intelligent agents, and unmanned assets working together toward common goals, “teaming”, through the development of interaction strategies for this future contextual domain. Twenty interaction strategies were derived from three objectives to account for system changes anticipated from the introduction of NGCVs. In particular, consideration is given for improving awareness of team members, maintaining flexible coordination, and working within the constraints of the new environment. Future work should focus on validating the strategies and the implementation of strategies into NGCV design.

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