An Army-led research team developed new algorithms and filled in knowledge gaps about how robots contribute to teams and what robots know about their environment and teammates.
"The idea of integrating context to AI development is a difficult process," Schaefer-Lay said. "Researchers tend to have very different ideas about what is meant by context and the best practices for integrating context into AI development."
Dr. Kristin Schaefer-Lay, an engineer with the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory, is part of a multidisciplinary team of reseachers from the Army, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Minnesota and the University of Central Florida -- amongst others, who developed specific algorithms and novel artificial intelligence approaches to support the development of a shared context between team members through effective bidirectional communication.
A number of researchers and institutions have looked a smaller pieces of this problem set, but this team looked at a more holistic approach for how to develop and integrate different types of context related to environmental context, mission context and social context to advance human-autonomy teaming through advanced bidirectional communication capabilities.
This has directly advanced science in robotics and AI processes in the areas of natural language communication, world model development, multi-modal communication and human-autonomy teaming, Schaefer-Lay said.