Using modeling as a lens to focus testing

Designers of collaborative unmanned systems assume that they have designed their systems to achieve the goals of reduced Soldier workload and higher level situation awareness (SA). Whether this assumption is valid, however, depends upon how soldiers interact with the systems as they accomplish their military missions. To evaluate their system design, designers of collaborative unmanned systems use field experiments in which soldiers interact with the systems. These experiments, however, are expensive and obtaining all the technologies and soldiers required to perform an entire military mission is challenging. Researchers at the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and Tank Automotive Research, Development, and Evaluation Command (TARDEC) have established an approach that is effective in overcoming these restraints. To represent the complete military mission, they use human performance modeling. To evaluate the impact of interface specifications on the soldiers, they conduct experiments that incorporate issues identified by the mission modeling. ARL and TARDEC demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach when they used human performance modeling of future concept combat vehicles to focus a series of TARDEC autonomous vehicle experiments on critical soldier survivability issues. The experiments, in turn, demonstrated a way of mitigating some of the soldier performance issues related to unmanned asset operations identified by the human performance modeling.