To facilitate cooperation between industry and scientific research, once again the D-CIS Human Factors Event will be hosting a series of Challenge Groups. These professionally facilitated, informal, innovative and creative discussions sessions offer a unique opportunity for human factors engineers and associated professions from across the academic, industrial, and research institute spectrums to discuss current hot topics within Human Factors.

 

There will be a specific aim or challenge for each discussion groups: for example creating an idea, a demonstration, or a project proposal. Of course, these challenge groups offer an excellent possibility for further networking with other researchers and end-users with the same interests.

 

 

Please find the topics of this year's challenge groups below

 

Challenge Group 1. Human robot interaction for unmanned ground vehicles

Organization: Thales Research & Technology, UK

 

Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) have the potential to greatly assist ground operations by reducing effort (e.g. carrying equipment), increasing safety (e.g. searching for mines), and providing information (e.g. transmitting sensor information back to a person).

 

However, they should not encumber humans with extra responsibilities, such as operating a handheld remote control unit, while they are doing other activities.

 

Human-robot interaction (HRI) tends to fall into two extremes. One is traditional tele-operation, where a user precisely controls a remote robot, such as an arm, to perform a well-defined task. Here the criteria for success are quantitative measures of speed and accuracy. The other is more trendy free-form social interaction, where a person interacts with a collocated robot, which reacts to speech and emotion. Here the criteria are qualitative measures of satisfaction, social engagement, and fun.

 

The less-studied middle ground in HRI is interaction between a human and a collocated autonomous robot via a multimodal user interface, which allows the human-robot team to get jobs done. Rather than presenting a conventional graphical user interface on a laptop or handheld computer, the robot should use the human's natural interaction mechanisms via input and output modalities such as speech recognition and synthesis, face and body tracking, gestures, and recognition of emotions in face, body and voice. This will allow humans to interact with UGVs in an intuitive way, and allow a combined human and robot team to work together naturally, rather than having the robot be a tele-operated tool of just one of the humans.

 

Possible usage scenarios for combined human-robot teams are: any task involving carrying heavy equipment; CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear) missions where hazardous materials restrict the movement of the human team members; surveillance, particularly of urban areas; detection of explosive devices; and border patrol.

 

The question here is: what interface should be provided to allow a human teammate to interact with a collocated autonomous robot in the most natural way possible? The current state of the art in input/output modalities is a factor, but rather than determining what is possible right now, the more important issue is how the human and robot should interact to get the best from each of them.

 

Challenge Group 2. Whom are you designing for: The average, the typical or the diverse?

Organization: University of Twente, The Netherlands

 

Imagine, you enter a shoe shop and ask for a pair in size 46. The saleslady, with an apologetic smile, informs you that all shoes are only available in size 43, because this is the average foot size of male Central Europeans.

A common research setup in Human Factors Engineering is to experimentally compare two (or more) design options based on performance or attitude measures. On grounds of a comparisons of means, you decide to favour one of the options. For decisions based on the average, can you ever claim these being optimal for the typical user or even the diversity of users in the target population?
 

In many sensitive areas of a citizens life, e.g. opening a bank account, direct human-human interaction is increasingly replaced by human-machine interaction. If it was your liability to design such a system to be appropriate for 99% of the population, how can you later on prove such claims.
 

You may have noble intents in the spirit of “Accessibility – Designing for All”. But honestly, to what extent is it feasible to make one design that is optimal, or at least tolerable, for a diversity of users?
 

During the research challenge the following (non-exclusive) list of issues are being discussed in a preferably multidisciplinary and multi-domain group:
• In what respect diversity of users is (or can be) considered relevant in various application domains
• Examples where
◦ designing for average/typical users is likely to fail
◦ designing with diversity in mind was a success
◦ designing for the average/typical users is sufficient
• How to further define and research diversity to make it accessible for engineering disciplines
• Societal, political and legal issues related to diversity
• Technological approaches and constraints to design for diversity
• Multi-disciplinary perspectives on designing for diversity – problem formulation and approaches to solutions
 

Challenge Group 3. Assessing information intake in command and control scenarios
Organization: NC3A, The Netherlands

 

In military and civilian organisations, commanders can be presented with an overwhelming amount of information as part of their command and control (C2) asks. Information is presented through many different mediums - audible and a mixture of visual sources. A typical control room may have several video streams from internal CCTV or surveillance systems, commercial news channel broadcasts; numerous text reports; photos and a number of graphical ‘operational pictures’ generated by C2 applications.

This plethora of systems leads to information overload and this is a recognised problem in modern command centres and control rooms. Improving the methods to present commanders with information could allow them to make more effective decisions.  But to do this requires an understanding of the relationship between information presentation and information retention and cognition. 

What techniques are available to assess the effectiveness of different techniques to present information to commanders ? Is there a relationship between the medium used to present information and the importance allocated that information by the commander ?  How can information intake be measured effectively ?  Could such measurement techniques be used to improve information presentation, both for individual media streams and for a combination ?