Development of a Soldier-Robot Teaming Synthetic Environment for Team Effectiveness Evaluation.

To help enhance mission effectiveness for future dismounted soldiers in the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF), a Soldier-Robot Teaming (SRT) concept has been developed and accepted as a force multiplier to extend operational abilities of dismounted soldiers in the battlefield, such as reducing the number of soldiers in dangerous environments and empowering them with advanced robot technologies. To support this endeavour, the Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) Toronto Research Centre (TRC) has led a research effort 'Concept of Operations (CONOPS) for SRT in the CAF’ since 2019. In the first research phase, key stakeholders within the Department of National Defence (DND) and CAF were engaged in a series of meetings and interviews to help identify future SRT concepts across a broad range of missions and operational environments. During the stakeholder analysis, five SRT use cases were developed and validated for the CAF to capture the intended SRT CONOPS, operational priorities, operational contexts, functionality, interactions, and expected mission performance, and to support Land Operations at section and platoon levels. To further facilitate SRT concept development and experimentation activities at DRDC TRC, a synthetic modeling and simulation environment was proposed and developed, in support of future SRT effectiveness research on team communication, coordination, collaboration and trust. In the meantime, this effort can also support studies on human-machine interface and human-systems integration, as well as help carry out SRT human-in-the-loop experiments and trials, for the CAF needs of reducing soldier workload and improving team performance and effectiveness in future SRT operations.