Adaptive level of autonomy for human-UAVs collaborative surveillance using situated fuzzy cognitive maps

Collaborating with a squad of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is challenging for a human operator in a cooperative surveillance task. In this paper, we propose a cognitive model that can dynamically adjust the Levels of Autonomy (LOA) of the human-UAVs team according to the changes in task complexity and human cognitive states. Specifically, we use the Situated Fuzzy Cognitive Map (SiFCM) to model the relations among tasks, situations, human states and LOA. A recurrent structure has been used to learn the strategy of adjusting the LOA, while the collaboration task is separated into a perception routine and a control routine. Experiment results have shown that the workload of the human operator is well balanced with the task efficiency. (c) 2020 Chinese Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Production and hosting by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).