DARPA's vision of the future for armored and mechanized military structure includes the use of mixed teams of human and robotic forces on a dynamic and rapidly changing battlefield. Successful implementation of this shift will require autonomous and semi-autonomous robotic forces and a command and control infrastructure that will allow human, robotic, and mixed teams to be controlled quickly and easily. This infrastructure will need to allow human commanders to control the robot teams in a similar manner to how they command human teams, that is, in the language of the military, not the language of robotic control theory. Furthermore, the human interface for robotic command and control must simplify the controller's tasks and automate processes in such a way that the cognitive workload is reduced, situation awareness is enhanced, and situational control is preserved.

In this paper we present a theoretic approach to creating such a system. The approach is centered on recasting the robotic control problem as a supervisory control problem, focusing on the human commander as supervisor of an intelligent command and control (C2) system. To explore and evaluate this approach our team is building a C2 framework of cooperative interface agents that reflect roles found in current command staffs. The intention is to create a virtual command staff for the robotic controller by embedding these military functions within the system itself. Although this work is ongoing, the results to date suggest that the approach we have taken will significantly reduce cognitive and human performance workload, thus improving overall usability and reducing training requirements. In addition to robotic control, this work opens up a new approach to controlling simulated entities during experimentation, training and mission rehearsal.