Jonathan M. Whetten

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About

Jonathan M. Whetten is a researcher whose work lies at the critical intersection of human factors and multi-robot systems. His primary research focuses on multi-operator supervisory control (MOSC), investigating how teams of humans can effectively manage fleets of independent robots. In his most influential work, "Beyond robot fan-out: Towards multi-operator supervisory control" (2010, 17 citations), Whetten identified two fundamental limitations on MOSC performance: task saturation and task diffusion. This foundational paper, combining human factors experiments with agent-based simulations, provides key insights into the cognitive and environmental constraints that arise when operators must supervise multiple robots simultaneously. Whetten’s subsequent work on specialization and fan-out (2010) further demonstrated that cooperating operator teams often possess untapped free capacity, which can be leveraged to improve primary task performance without increasing average fan-out. These contributions are essential for designing scalable, efficient human-robot teams, making Whetten’s research a cornerstone for anyone studying supervisory control in robotics, human-computer interaction, or collaborative autonomous systems.