Towards a framework for architecting heterogeneous teams of humans and robots for space exploration

Human-robotic systems will play a critical role in space exploration, should NASA embark on missions to the Moon and Mars. A unified framework to optimally leverage the capabilities of humans and robots in space exploration will be an invaluable tool for mission planning. Although there is a growing body of literature on human robotic interactions (HRI), there is not yet a framework that lends itself both to a formal representation of heterogeneous teams of humans and robots, and to an evaluation of such teams across a series of common, task-based metrics. My objective in this thesis is to lay the foundations of a unified framework for architecting human-robotic systems for optimal task performance given a set of metrics. First, I review literature from different fields including HRI and human-computer interaction, and synthesize multiple considerations for architecting heterogeneous teams of humans and robots. I then present methods to systematically and formally capture the characteristics that describe a human-robotic system to provide a basis for evaluating human-robotic systems against a common set of metrics.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Arnold, Julie Ann, S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Jeffrey A. Hoffman and Joseph H. Saleh.

• Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/35583

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/35583