February 04, 2013, Bren 4016

As increasingly sophisticated systems such as highly autonomous aircraft and smart building systems are being fielded in real-world missions, our work strives to understand what the role the human supervisor of these systems will be. Our research questions focus around these key areas: should the operator become a passive supervisor that only occasionally gets involved when the system needs help, risking losses of operator situational awareness? Or should the operator be highly involved in the micromanagement of the system, increasing operator workload? Can we design algorithms that can steer an operator to allocating their attention to the appropriate task at the most relevant time? This talk will address the increasingly growing area of human machine interaction in next generation systems at UTRC, and we will discuss recent work as applied to highly autonomous systems and intelligent building systems.

Luca F. Bertuccelli is currently a senior research engineer at the United Technologies Research Center in East Hartford, CT, leading human machine interaction research, where he joined in August, 2011. He received a B.S. from Purdue University in 2002, a M.S. and Ph.D. in Aeronautics/Astronautics from MIT in 2004 and 2008 respectively. He has been a post-doctoral associate at MIT in the area of human supervisory control and has served as a USAF officer. The United Technologies Research Center is a central research organization that pursues technologies for improving the performance, energy efficiency and cost of United Technologies (UTC) products and processes, with offices in East Hartford, China, and Ireland. United Technologies (UTC) is a diversified company that provides a broad range of high-technology products and services to the global aerospace and building systems industries. Our commercial businesses are Otis elevators and escalators and UTC Climate, Controls & Security, a leading provider of heating, ventilation, air conditioning, fire and security systems, building automation and controls. Our aerospace businesses are Sikorsky aircraft and the new UTC Propulsion & Aerospace Systems, which includes Pratt & Whitney aircraft engines and UTC Aerospace Systems aerospace products.