In-Vehicle Tactile Displays to Enhance Crew Situation Awareness and Understanding of Agents in a Simulated Driving Environment.

Chen et al. (2014) proposed the situation awareness-based agent transparency (SAT) model, which is a framework for improving human situation awareness and understanding of autonomous agents’ actions, intentions, goals and reasoning. Research using the SAT model as a framework has traditionally focused on displaying transparency concept information in the visual modality. Presenting information in the visual modality exclusively can increase human operators’ cognitive load. Multiple Resource Theory suggests that offloading information to other modalities can reduce cognitive load (Wickens 2002). One such modality that can potentially reduce workload is the tactile modality. Tactile displays, which use somatosensory stimulation, have been found to be useful in improving navigation performance with spatial information and providing alerts. One of the current Army Modernization Priorities is the development of Next Generation Combat Vehicles (NGCV), which conceptually includes both manned and unmanned vehicles. Here we present our work in implementing tactile displays to enhance crew situation awareness and improve the understanding of agents in this simulated environment. The operator, through a tactile belt, will be provided spatial information for navigation as well as information for notifications and alerts about the agent’s status and actions. We hypothesize that the integration of tactile displays in the vehicle will improve crew situation awareness and their understanding of the agents for effective interaction and tasks performance.