Achieving the Vision of Effective Soldier-Robot Teaming

Abstract

The U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) Autonomous Systems Enterprise has a vision for the future of effective Soldier-robot teaming. Our research program focuses on three primary thrust areas: communications, teaming, and shared cognition. Here we discuss a recent study in communications, where we collected data using a multimodal interface comprised of speech, gesture, touch and a visual display to command a robot to perform semantically-based tasks. Observations on usability and participant expectations with respect to the interaction with the robot were obtained. Initial observations are reported, showing that the speech-gesture-visual multimodal interface was liked and performed well. Areas for improvement were noted.