Ph.D. Proposal
Richard Agbeyibor
(Advisor: Prof. Karen Feigh)
"Human-AI Collaboration Aboard Crewed Autonomous Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Aircraft"
Wednesday, December 11
2:30 p.m.
Montgomery Knight Building 317
Abstract
With the maturity of autonomy and Advanced Air Mobility aircraft (AAM), it may soon be feasible to use autonomous aircraft for specialized aviation missions. This research is among the first to explore human-AI collaboration aboard crewed autonomous Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft. Using flight simulator studies, it empirically evaluates the challenges to fluency — defined through trust, workload, situation awareness and interaction — in teams of non-pilot humans and AI Pilots collaborating on ISR missions. The first phase of this research examined how task complexity and various AI Pilot capabilities influence mission performance and team fluency. Results to date indicate that a predictable range of safety and mission efficiency can be assured through run-time assurance. Although Control Barrier Function-enabled run-time assurance improved safety, it increased mission duration. Building on these findings, the proposed work seeks to mitigate this time-safety tradeoff by using the attention state of the human operator as a feedback signal for an adaptive AI Pilot. Additionally, it explores methods for real-time estimation of operator cognitive state. Finally, the proposed work extends this research to multi-aircraft collaborative ISR contexts and explores the role of operator background and experience in human-AI collaboration. This thesis contributes to the safe and efficient integration of human-AI teams in autonomous ISR missions, with broader implications for the future of autonomy and advanced air mobility,
Committee
- Prof. Karen M. Feigh – School of Aerospace Engineering (advisor)
- Prof. Samuel Coogan – School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
- Prof. Kyriakos Vamvoudakis– School of Aerospace Engineering
- Prof. Mengyao Li – School of Psychology
- Dr. Joseph B. Lyons – Air Force Research Laboratory