Creating An Objective Methodology For Human-Robot Team Configuration Selection

As technology has been advancing and designers have been looking to future

applications, it has become increasingly evident that robotic technology can be used

to supplement, augment, and improve human performance of tasks. Team members

can be combined in various combinations to better utilize their capabilities and

skills to create more ecient and diversied operational teams. A primary obstacle

to integrating new robotic technology has been the inability to quantitatively compare

overall team performance between very dierent team congurations without

limiting the analysis to a few metrics. To-date, mission designers have arbitrarily

assigned importance to mission parameters, subjectively limiting the search space.

While this has been eective at evaluating individual mission plans, the arbitrary

evaluation criteria has made a straightforward comparison between dierent research

projects and ranking scales impossible. The question then becomes how to select

an objective set of criteria for any given problem.