Military robots are expected to play an important role in the future battlefield, and will be actively engaged in dangerous, repetitive and difficult tasks. During the robots perform the tasks a human operator controls the robots in a supervisory way. The operator recognizes battlefield situations from remote robots through an interface of the operator control center, and controls them. In the meantime, operator workload, controller interface, robot automation level, and task complexity affect robot operability. In order to assess the robot operability, we have developed ROSim (Robot Operational Simulator) incorporating these operational factors. In this paper, we introduce the results of applying ROSim experimentally to the assessment of reconnaissance robot operability in a battle field. This experimental assessment shows three resulting measurements: operational control workload, operational control capability, mission success rate, and discuss its applicability to the defense robot research and development. It is expected that ROSim can contribute to the design of an operator control center and the design analysis of a human-robot team in the defense robot research and development.

Unmanned military vehicles (UMVs) will be increasingly applied to the various military operations. These UMVs are most commonly characterized as dealing with “4D” task – dull, dirty, dangerous and difficult with automations. Although most of the UMVs are designed to a high degree of autonomy, the human operator will still intervene in the robots operation, and tele-operate them to achieve his or her mission. Thus, operator capacity, along with robot autonomy and user interface, is one of the important design factors in the research and development of the UMVs. In this paper, we propose the method to assess the operator capacity of the UMVs. The method is comprised of the 6 steps (problem, assumption, goal function identification, operator task analysis, task modeling & simulation, results and assessment), and herein colored Petri-nets are used for the modeling and simulation. Further, an illustrative example is described at the end of this paper.