DARPA awards Raytheon Contract to Improve Human Machine Teaming

The DARPA awarded Raytheon BBN an 18-month contract to investigate new methods and design practices to support effective human-machine teaming as part of the Enhancing Design for Graceful Extensibility program.

BBN will work to develop human machine interfaces that enable non-expert operators to understand critical system processes; system performance thresholds based on environmental, physical, and software constraints; and the operating context and mission goals.

Today’s modeling plans human interface design after the system is built, making for a more reactive and info-centric environment.  By applying TGE at the forefront the team will create a more flexible and adaptive model that can respond better to surprise, in collaboration with human operators.

The team’s approach is expected to improve: system performance by using adaptive capacity, responsiveness by alerting and orienting operators to potential problems, and performance by reducing the risk of system failure.

The Raytheon BBN led team includes Mile Two and UMass-Lowell.