Foundations of human-agent collaboration: situation-relevant information sharing

The Project

Australian Research Council (ARC) Competitive Research Grant (Discovery Project), Foundations of human-agent collaboration: situation-relevant information sharing.

This project is part of the Defence Science Institute's research program on Surveillance and Autonomy.

The Investigators

Professor Liz Sonenberg, Assoc Professor Adrian Pearce, and Assoc Professor Frank Dignum.

The Project

This project tackles a challenging problem faced in collaborative systems. Human-agent robotic teamwork, also termed human-automation teamwork, involving teams comprised of software agents, robots and humans, is increasingly being exploited to carry out tasks such as remote management of air or ground vehicles, and robot-assisted search and rescue operations. Such use of software assistants and physical robots to support human activities will increase in coming years. When action outcomes can be uncertain, successful collaborative activity cannot be fully pre-scripted, but must allow for adjustment as events unfold.

There is a pressing need for the development of new techniques in collaborative systems for representing and reasoning about joint task achievement in dynamic environments. As automated systems become more sophisticated in their capabilities, the design of effective interaction with human operators becomes more demanding.

The goal of this project is to discover new algorithms and software prototypes that will support the development of human-automation teams that can coordinate and collaborate in fast changing task environments.

The Department

The project is conducted in the Department of Computing and Information Systems. The University of Melbourne is a dynamic research environment, with a large number of Academics, Research Fellows and PhD students working within the field of artificial intelligence.

More Information

For more information, contact: Professor Liz Sonenberg or Adrian Pearce.