Providing appropriate situation awareness within a mixed-initiative control system

The future of air combat relies on humans controlling large teams of unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAVs) within a dynamic battle environment. Under the DARPA Mixed Initiative Control of Automata (MICA) program, we have been challenged to design a system that empowers a human operator to control teams of up to thirty UCAVs. To address these challenges we are designing an interaction system that defines and provides adequate situation and automation awareness without overloading human operators to the point where their performance degrades gracelessly. The proposed mixed initiative system is situated within a complex and highly dynamic information space that could easily overload the multi-tasking human operators. Dozens of system parameters could be updated thousands of times during a typical mission so it is neither feasible nor prudent for human operators to maintain complete situation and automation awareness. This interaction system will provide appropriately abstracted situation awareness and notification capability that includes: general mission monitoring and automation awareness; task specific information requirements; and user initiated information requests. Our approach involves defining adequate situation awareness as a function of mission phase, human operator role, and abstracted information required to oversee tasked UCAV.