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This paper describes ongoing efforts to address the challenges of supervising teams of heterogeneous unmanned vehicles through the use of demonstrated Ecological Interface Design (EID) principles. We first review the EID framework and discuss how we have applied it to the unmanned systems domain. Then, drawing from specific interface examples, we present several generalizable design strategies for improved supervisory control displays. We discuss how ecological display techniques can be used to increase the transparency and observability of highly automated unmanned systems by enabling operators to efficiently perceive and reason about automated support outcomes and purposefully direct system behavior.

When environment access is mediated through robotic sensors, field experience and naturalistic studies show robot handlers have difficulties comprehending remote environments - they experience what domain practitioners often call a 'soda straw'. This illustrates the keyhole effect in Human Robot Interaction, a CSE phenomena studied in the context of large virtual data space interfaces and the current research seeks to reduce this effect. A simulation for human-robot coordinated search and rescue was created based on WTC response experiences. Pilot studies showed traditional performance measures to be inadequate in analyzing control and exploration tasks therefore a novel analysis approach based on fractal path tortuosity was developed. New interface concepts for helping remote observers perceive environmental affordances were then tested using the simulation environment and evaluation measures. These studies look to concepts based on Gibsonian principles to reduce keyhole effects in control interfaces to enhance remote functional presence in Human-Robot Coordination.

This paper explores the central role played by coordination during fire incident response. Following preliminary investigations based on other methods, the authors analyzed a corpus of 29 critical incident reports produced by one fire department's safety services. Urban firefighting is a complex domain in which members' activities need to be highly synchronized in order to reach common operational and safety goals. As the work environment challenges the capacity of firefighters to coordinate efficiently, coordination breakdowns might occur, creating safety threats as role interdependencies become difficult to manage.

The study of spatial vision is a long and well traveled road (which, of course, converges to a vanishing point at the horizon). Its various distortions have been widely investigated empirically, and most concentrate, pragmatically, on the space anterior to the observer. The visual world behind the observer has received relatively less attention and it is this perspective the current experiments address. Our results show systematic perceptual distortions in the posterior visual world when viewed statically. Under static viewing conditions, observer's perceptual representation was consistently 'spread' in a hyperbolic fashion. Directions to distant, peripheral locations were consistently overestimated by about 11 degrees from the ground truth and this variability increased as the target was moved toward the center of the observer's back. The perceptual representation of posterior visual space is, no doubt, secondary to the more immediate needs of the anterior visual world. Still, it is important in some domains including certain sports, such as rowing, and in vehicular navigation.