In autonomous multiagent or multirobotic systems, the ability to quickly and accurately respond to threats and uncertainties is important for both mission outcomes and survivability. Such systems are never truly autonomous, often operating as part of a human-agent team. Artificial intelligent agents (IAs) have been proposed as tools to help manage such teams; e.g., proposing potential courses of action

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Software is a critical component of brain–computer interfaces (BCIs). While BCI hardware enables the retrieval of brain signals, BCI software is required to analyze these signals, produce output, and provide feedback. Users from multiple research areas have adopted BCI software platforms to investigate various concepts. Recently, interest in web-based BCI software has also emerged. The system design

Prosthetic hands have made a significant influence on the quality of life of people with upper arm amputation. Research on prosthetic hands today is focused on replicating the functionalities of the biological hands. The present article provides a bibliometric survey on bionic hands, done through a compilation of a scientific publications database on the field of prosthetic hands spanning the last

This article reviews the human–machine interaction (HMI) technologies used for telemanipulation by small unmanned systems (SUS) with remote manipulators. SUS, including land, air, and sea vehicles, can perform a wide range of reconnaissance and manipulation tasks with varying levels of autonomy. SUS operations involving physical interactions with the environment require some level of operator involvement

This article presents a locomotion controller for lower limb exoskeletons so as to enable the combined robot and user system to exhibit compliant walking characteristics when interacting with the environment. This is of critical importance to reduce the excessive ground reaction forces during the walking task execution with the aim of improved environmental interaction capabilities. In robot-aided

Movement/walking assistance devices have the great advantage of supporting quality of life for the elderly in an aging society. To strike a balance between efficiency of movement and employment of the elderly user's own body, we developed a smart mobility system called Tread-walk, which is controlled by the user walking on a treadmill and amplifies the user's walking speed. Since the user's walking

Novel driver support systems potentially enhance road safety by cooperating with the human driver. To optimize the design of emerging steering support systems, a profound understanding of driver steering behavior is required. This article proposes a new theory of driver steering, which unifies visual perception and control models. The theory is derived directly from measured steering data, without

Virtual reality (VR) has proven to be a useful tool for conducting human factors research in interface design. With the development and promotion of autonomous vehicle (AV) technology, researchers are focusing on designing different types of interfaces to induce trust in road users toward this new technology. In this article, VR is used to investigate pedestrians’ understanding of proposed designs

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The primary purpose of this article is to determine the impact of a simulated agent's transparency on human performance and related variables, such as response time, workload, and trust calibration. The agent supports participants as they complete a base defense task by managing a team of heterogeneous unmanned vehicles and serves as a decision aid to the human. Three conditions of transparency are

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Mobile crowdsensing recruits a group of mobile users to cooperatively perform a common sensing job with their smart devices. As a special issue, photo crowdsensing allows users to utilize the built-in cameras of mobile devices to take photos for an event or a target. Then, the photos can be used in numerous application areas, such as target reconstruction, scenario reduction, and so on. Therefore,

This article describes a stochastic framework for integrating human whole-body motions with natural language. Human whole-body motions in daily life are measured by inertial measurement units (IMU) and subsequently encoded into motion primitives. Sentences are manually attached to the human motion primitives for their descriptions. Two aspects of semantics and syntactics are represented by stochastic

This paper presents accurate grasp prediction algorithms that can be used for naturalistic, synergistic control of exoskeleton gloves with minimal user input. Recent research in exoskeleton systems has focused mainly on the development of novel soft or hard mechanical designs and actuation systems for rehabilitative and assistive applications. On the other hand, estimating user intent for intelligent

Pattern-recognition-based myoelectric control systems are not yet widely available due to their limited robustness in real-life situations. Some postprocessing methods were introduced to improve the robustness in previous studies, but there is lack of investigation into movement transition phases. This article presents a novel postprocessing method based on movement pattern transition (MPT) detection

Traditional human-robot interfaces usually have limitations in accuracy and/or operational space. This article proposes a natural human-robot interface using an adaptive tracking method, which can effectively expand the operational space while ensuring high accuracy. The natural interface allows the robot to directly reproduce the user's hand movement, making the interaction more intuitive and natural

Virtual reality (VR) is regarded as a useful tool for teleoperation systems and provides operators with immersive visual feedback on the robot and the environment. However, without any haptic feedback or physical constructions, VR-based teleoperation systems normally suffer from poor maneuverability, and operational faults may be caused in some fine movements. In this article, we employ mixed reality

The 1960s crossover model is widely applied to quantitatively predict a human controller's (HC's) manual control behavior. Unfortunately, the theory captures only compensatory tracking behavior and, as such, a limited range of real-world manual control tasks. This article finalizes recent advances in manual control theory toward more general pursuit and preview tracking tasks. It is quantified how

This article investigates performance in multiple concurrent tracking tasks with multisensory displays in a driving context. In many work domains, such as driving, aviation, process control, and medicine, humans perform “tracking” tasks that involve observing continuous variables and providing a control input to achieve and maintain satisfactory levels in those variables. Performance in multiple concurrent

This paper employs computational approaches to model and explore the efficacy of different incentive structures on the decision making behavior of dispatchers in complex queueing networks, and the subsequent effects of these decisions on teams working within the network and on network performance itself. Computational models that express network structure and function, as well as the decision making

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As machines and agents become more autonomous, it has been increasingly clear to human factors/ergonomics researchers and practitioners that agent transparency is a critical issue for effective human–agent teaming. Transparency methods can provide the foundation for establishing shared awareness and shared intent between humans and intelligent machines. However, to date, the existing body of research

The introduction of increasingly intelligent and autonomous systems raises novel human factors challenges for human–machine teaming. People utilize differing mental models in understanding the functioning of complex systems that may be capable of social agency. Operators may perceive the machine as either a complex tool or a humanlike teammate. When the “advanced tool” mental model is adopted, operator

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often exhibit impairments in communication and social interaction, and thus face various social challenges in collaborative activities. Given the cost of ASD intervention and lack of access to trained clinicians, technology-assisted ASD intervention has gained momentum in recent years. In this paper, we present a novel collaborative virtual environment

Research indicates that human-robot interaction can help children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). While most early robot-mediated interaction studies were based on free interactions, recent studies have shown that robot-mediated interventions that focus on the core impairments of ASD such as joint attention deficit tend to produce better outcomes. Joint attention impairment is one of the core

Individuals with cognitive impairment can benefit from intervention strategies like recording important information in a memory notebook. However, training individuals to use the notebook on a regular basis requires a constant delivery of reminders. In this work, we design and evaluate machine learning-based methods for providing automated reminders using a digital memory notebook interface. Specifically

Quality assessment is the focus of many health care initiatives. Yet it is not well understood how the type of information used in decision support tools to enable judgments of quality based on data impacts the accuracy, consistency and reliability of judgments made by physicians. Comparative pooled information could allow physicians to judge the quality of their practice by making comparisons to other

Cervical auscultation is the recording of sounds and vibrations caused by the human body from the throat during swallowing. While traditionally done by a trained clinician with a stethoscope, much work has been put towards developing more sensitive and clinically useful methods to characterize the data obtained with this technique. The eventual goal of the field is to improve the effectiveness of screening

The healthcare system is moving from one primary physician who assumes responsibility for each patient to a more team-based approach. Thus, assessing team communication is critical. This study characterizes and assesses the quality of hospitalist handover communications at shift change using the literature recommended content and language form elements. Quality handovers should contain the following

The reported study compares groups of 120 participants each, from the United States (U.S.), Taiwan (TW), and Turkey (TK), interacting with versions of an automated path planner that vary in transparency and degree of automation. The nationalities were selected in accordance with the theory of cultural syndromes as representatives of Dignity (U.S.), Face (TW), and Honor (TK) cultures, and were predicted

Agent transparency is an important contributor to human performance, situation awareness (SA), and trust in human–agent teaming. However, agent transparency's effects on human performance when the agent is unreliable have yet to be examined. This paper examined how the transparency and reliability of an autonomous robotic squad member (ASM) affected a human observer's task performance, workload, SA

This study focuses on the transparent design of a cognitive agent to enhance situation awareness in two aspects of a human-agent teaming application: assisted system management and mixed-initiative mission planning. Adaptive and complex agent behavior might result in the failure to comprehend resulting interventions, a decrease in trust, and a loss of overall situation awareness. This study describes

In this paper, we study human trust and its computational models in supervisory control of swarm robots with varied levels of autonomy (LOA) in a target foraging task. We implement three LOAs: manual, mixed-initiative (MI), and fully autonomous LOA. While the swarm in the MI LOA is controlled by a human operator and an autonomous search algorithm collaboratively, the swarms in the manual and autonomous