Cognitive Engineering Practice Case Studies: Synthetic Teammates Foster Teamwork and Improve C2 Skills ___________________________________________________

Challenge

Team coordination and cross-team coordination skills in aviation command and control are perishable skills that require frequent practice to keep current. Unfortunately, training exercises involving real aircraft and crews are expensive, logistically complex, and all-too-infrequent.

Ideally, simulation-based methods would offer sufficient practice, but these require both believable and realistic simulated teammates. The Office of Naval Research wanted to determine whether this goal could be achieved.

Result

With the support of the Office of Naval Research, CHI Systems built a prototype training system called SCOTT (Synthetic Cognition for Operational Team Training) to show how COGNET and iGEN could be used to build synthetic teammates, simulated role-players, and embedded instructors to achieve this goal.

A desktop simulation-based environment was developed by the CHI Systems Cognitive Engineering Practice and the Software Engineering and Systems Integration Practice. This environment allowed a tactical crew of a Navy E-2C aircraft to practice teamwork and C2 skills by collaborating with synthetic teammates and role-players.

These iGEN-based synthetic entities use speech interactions to work with the human trainees and each other. This allows the trainee to practice specific tasks and teamwork skills. One synthetic entity also acts as an instructor and provides situation feedback and detailed data for an after-action review.

Reference

Zachary, W., Santarelli, T., Lyons, D., Bergondy, M. & Johnson, J. (2001). Using a community of intelligent synthetic entities to support operational team training. Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Computer Generated Forces and Behavioral Representation. Orlando: Institute for Simulation and Training. pp: 215-224.

Scolaro, J. & Santarelli, T. (2002). Cognitive modeling teamwork, taskwork, and instructional behavior in synthetic teammates. Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Computer Generated Forces and Behavioral Representation. Orlando: Institute for Simulation and Training.