A study of human-agent collaboration for multi-UAV task allocation in dynamic environments

Ramchurn, Sarvapali D.; Fischer, Joel E.; Ikuno, Yuki; Wu, Feng; Flann, Jack; Waldock, Antony

Abstract

We consider a setting where a team of humans oversee the coordination of multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to perform a number of search tasks in dynamic environments that may cause the UAVs to drop out. Hence, we develop a set of multi-UAV supervisory control interfaces and a multi-agent coordination algorithm to support human decision making in this setting. To elucidate the resulting interactional issues, we compare manual and mixed-initiative task allocation in both static and dynamic environments in lab studies with 40 participants and observe that our mixed initiative system results in lower workloads and better performance in re-planning tasks than one which only involves manual task allocation. Our analysis points to new insights into the way humans appropriate flexible autonomy.

Citation

Ramchurn, S. D., Fischer, J. E., Ikuno, Y., Wu, F., Flann, J., & Waldock, A. A study of human-agent collaboration for multi-UAV task allocation in dynamic environments. Presented at International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-15)

• Conference Name: International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-15)
• End Date: Jul 31, 2015
• Publication Date: Jul 31, 2015
• Deposit Date: Feb 10, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 10, 2016
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/755945
• Publisher URL: http://ijcai.org/papers15/Abstracts/IJCAI15-171.html
• Additional Information: The following statement has been received from Vesna Sabljakovic-Fritz, the IJCAI Executive Secretary "We welcome open-access publications and, in fact, publish our proceedings free of charge online. You can publish any version of the paper published at IJCAI. The only requirement is that a reference (and a link) to the copyright holder (IJCAI) is required"; ; Copyright IJCAI 2015