Keep Me in the Loop: Increasing Operator Situation Awareness through a Conversational Multimodal Interface

Autonomous systems are designed to carry out activities in remote, hazardous environments without the need for operators to micro-manage them. It is, however, essential that operators maintain situation awareness in order to monitor vehicle status and handle unforeseen circumstances that may affect their intended behaviour, such as a change in the environment. We present MIRIAM, a multimodal interface that combines visual indicators of status with a conversational agent component. This multimodal interface offers a fluid and natural way for operators to gain information on vehicle status and faults, mission progress and to set reminders. We describe the system and an evaluation study providing evidence that such an interactive multimodal interface can assist in maintaining situation awareness for operators of autonomous systems, irrespective of cognitive styles.