---
title: "A Study of Human-Agent Collaboration for Multi-UAV Task Allocation in Dynamic Environments"
authors:
  - "Sarvapali D. Ramchurn"
  - "Joel E. Fischer"
  - "Yuki Ikuno"
  - "Feng Wu"
  - "Jack Flann"
  - "Antony Waldock"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2015/171"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2015/0171.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2015
pages: "1184-1191"
track: "Main Track"
keywords:
---

# A Study of Human-Agent Collaboration for Multi-UAV Task Allocation in Dynamic Environments

Sarvapali D. Ramchurn, Joel E. Fischer, Yuki Ikuno, Feng Wu, Jack Flann, Antony Waldock

*Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 1184-1191.

## Abstract

We consider a setting where a team of humans oversee the coordination of multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to perform a number of search tasks in dynamic environments that may cause the UAVs to drop out. Hence, we develop a set of multi-UAV supervisory control interfaces and a multi-agent coordination algorithm to support human decision making in this setting. To elucidate the resulting interactional issues, we compare manual and mixed-initiative task allocation in both static and dynamic environments in lab studies with 40 participants and observe that our mixed-initiative system results in lower workloads and better performance in re-planning tasks than one which only involves manual task allocation. Our analysis points to new insights into the way humans appropriate flexible autonomy.