ABSTRACT
Today’s highly automated robotic systems are tied into military work processes supporting the human war fighter. This chapter will take uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs) as an example. Typically, UAVs are being used to fulfill certain well-defined sub-tasks. The human operator is in the role of the high-end decision component, determining the work process and supervising the automation. With emergent technology highly automated systems can be beneficial on the one hand; but automation may also cause problems on its own. This is the case due to its inherent complexity, which is often not easy to handle by humans. A new way of introducing automation into work systems will be advocated by this contribution, overcoming the classical pitfalls of human-automation interaction and simultaneously taking the benefit as required. This will be achieved by so-called cognitive automation, i.e. providing human-like problem-solving, decision-making, and knowledge-processing capabilities to machines in order to obtain goal-directed behavior and effective operator assistance. A key feature of cognitive automation is the ability to create its own comprehensive representation of the current situation and to provide reasonable action. By additionally providing full knowledge of the prime work objectives to the automation it will be enabled to co-operate with the human operator in supervision and decision tasks, thus being intelligent machine assistants for the human operator in the workplace. Such assistant systems understand the work objective and will be aiming to achieve of the overall desired work result. They will understand the situation (e.g. opportunities, conflicts) and actions of team members—whether humans or assistant systems—and will pursue goals for co-operation and co-ordination (e.g. task coverage, avoidance of redundancy, or team member overcharge). Thereby a completely new approach to human-automation interaction will be established, which we call co-operative control. Furthermore, cognitive automation can emerge towards being highly automated intelligent agents in charge of certain supportive tasks to be performed in a semi-autonomous mode. These cognitive semi-autonomous systems and the cognitive 146assistants will be denoted as the two faces of Dual-Mode Cognitive Automation (Onken & Schulte, forthcoming).
