Task switching and cognitively compatible guidance for control of multiple robots

Decision aiding sometimes fails not because following guidance would not improve performance but because humans have difficulty in following guidance as it is presented to them. This paper presents a new analysis of data from multi-robot control experiments in which guidance in a demonstrably superior robot selection strategy failed to produce improvement in performance. We had earlier suggested that the failure to benefit might be related to loss of volition in switching between robots being controlled. In this paper we present new data indicating that spatial, and hence cognitive proximity, of robots may play a role in making volitional switches more effective. Foraging tasks, such as search and rescue or reconnaissance, in which UVs are either relatively sparse and unlikely to interfere with one another or employ automated path planning, form a broad class of applications in which multiple robots can be controlled sequentially in a round-robin fashion. Such human-robot systems can be described as a queuing system in which the human acts as a server while robots presenting requests for service are the jobs. The possibility of improving system performance through well- known scheduling techniques is an immediate consequence. Two experiments investigating scheduling interventions are described. The first compared a system in which all anomalous robots were alarmed (Alarm), one in which alarms were presented singly in the order in which they arrived (FIFO) and a Control condition without alarms. The second experiment employed failures of varying difficulty supporting an optimal shortest job first (SJF) policy. SJF, FIFO, and Alarm conditions were compared. In both experiments performance in directed attention conditions was poorer than predicted. This paper presents new data comparing the spatial proximity in switches between robots selected by the operator (Alarm conditions) and those dictated by the system (FIFO and SJF conditions).