Agents with personality: human operator assistants

The Future Combat Systems (FCS) concept for the Department of Defense (DoD) has made unmanned systems as a prime focus. Currently, an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) requires a team of several individuals to effectively operate the UAV. The FCS concept will change this to where a single operator is in control of multiple UAVs. The increase in responsibility on the operator brings an increase in cognitive load leading to the need for automated assistants. This paper introduces a novel concept for human operator assistance based on adding personality traits to software agents. It has been shown that operator interfaces that provide positive feedback and decision support in a personable fashion lead to better performance than systems that provide only factual information. This work shows how personality at the UAV level and at the human interface level can be combined to produce an interactive system to control the actions of multiple UAVs, managing them without the need for intricate plans in place for the UAVs to follow. This paper shows the origins of the work, the architecture and concept, and mock-up depictions of the control interface with descriptions of how the operator will be able to interact with the UAVs.