Spatial Ability in Military Human-Robot Interaction: A State-of-the-Art Assessment

摘要

In the dismounted military field, robots and unmanned vehicles are increasingly used as force multipliers and teammates. As such, a fluent human-robot interaction (HRI) becomes vital and is stimulated by fitting the robot and its interface to the human teammate's capabilities. This is where individual differences of the human needs to be considered, such as those found in spatial ability. In HRI, information presented to the human teammate requires mental manipulation and interpretation to inform subsequent human actions, which relies on spatial ability. In order to generalize findings to the armed forces and to inform future design requirements, factors pertaining to construct operationalization, measurement, and task type need to be examined. The aim of the present literature review is to investigate spatial ability findings in military HRI. In this review, metadata over the past decade are synthesized in light of a formal factor analysis of spatial ability [8]. The results show that the opera-tionalizations of spatial ability are alarmingly divergent in the research field of military/UxV HRI. The relationship between spatial ability and task performance in our findings is complicated by a lack of standardized assessments of spatial ability and a small sample size, which is an indication of the current state of affairs. However, there is a conservative indication of a relationship between aspects of spatial ability and primary military reconnaissance tasks. As an effort to inform future studies, this literature review concludes with recommendations for military-affiliated research and development, to enhance the measurement, validation, and generalization of findings of an individual factor that has the potential to benefit a fluent HRI and the transition of robots from tools to teammates.