The Departmental Seminar Series is open to all. U-M Industrial and Operations Engineering graduate students and faculty are especially encouraged to attend.

Title:
The Interaction of Autonomy & Training for First-Person Drone Flights

Abstract:
While increasing automation has made UAVs, aka drones, accessible to a wider population of operators as compared to conventional aviation, such increased use has led to many preventable accidents. While added automation may make flight control more stable, the remote nature of the task can lead to degraded situation awareness, mode confusion and increased crashes. There are competing theories as to how much training and onboard autonomy are needed to successfully train drone operators, and this effort will discuss the results of a series of three studies that investigate balancing training and autonomy to achieve expertise, including how hidden Markov models can be used to predict who successfully obtains expertise and when a transition from novice to expert occurs.

Bio:
Professor Mary (Missy) Cummings received her B.S. in Mathematics from the US Naval Academy in 1988, her M.S. in Space Systems Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School in 1994, and her Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia in 2004. A naval officer and military pilot from 1988-1999, she was one of the U.S. Navy's first female fighter pilots. She is currently a Professor in the Duke University Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, and the Director of the Humans and Autonomy Laboratory. She is an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Fellow, and a member of several national committees. Her research interests include human supervisory control, explainable artificial intelligence, human-autonomous system collaboration, human-robot interaction, human-systems engineering, and the ethical and social impact of technology.