A prospective look at a synthetic teammate for UAV applications

This paper describes current progress and future plans for research and development in synthetic teammates for applications in training, analysis, and system design for UAV operations. The development of these teammates involves the eventual integration of several distinct, yet related, basic and applied research lines, including navigation and orientation in virtual environments, computational cognitive process modeling of aircraft maneuvering and reconnaissance missions, verbal interaction between human operators and synthetic entities, and the formal analysis of team skill. The use of the ACT-R cognitive modeling architecture to create computational cognitive process models serves as a common thread that will be helpful in integrating the products of these research lines into a functional system. The paper provides a summary of the current status of our research, as well as a description of externally developed technologies we plan to leverage in order to achieve our goal of a high-fidelity cognitive model that is able to operate as a member of a team performing UAV reconnaissance missions.