The research objective of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program grant is to study and model the interplay of spatial control, perception and planning functions in human guidance skills. Ample empirical evidence exists supporting the observation that experienced pilots or operators display patterns in their behavior. These patterns are significant because they are manifestations of the mechanisms used by humans to organize and implement agile guidance behaviors. Guidance tasks conducted with small-scale helicopters will be used to generate experimental data that combine vehicle motion, pilot control and visual gaze information. The research is organized in three threads: 1) Determine the principles of patterns' emergence using a data-driven approach combining dynamics, control, identification and data-clustering methods; 2) Analyze the transition across patterns and their dynamic makeup to determine the underlying model structures; and finally 3) Integrate the gained knowledge to form an interaction model that describes the interplay between control, perceptual and planning functions.
If successful this research will enable tele-operation systems that take advantage of the operator's innate guidance functions to reduce workload and increase safety. Example applications include search and rescue helicopters or tele-surgery systems. These systems will work by directing the operator's visual attention to cues that are significant to performance and conversely, decode visual attention to predict future control actions. The proposed research activities will promote interactions between the fields of control engineering and cognitive sciences. Cross-disciplinary opportunities will be leveraged to: 1) Create stimulating undergraduate and graduate courses; 2) Encourage the involvement of underrepresented students in the research environment; 3) Design outreach activities for high-schools and elementary schools. The results will be disseminated through a website accessible to the broader public and through conference workshops designed to reach across the control and human factor communities.
