Concordia University
Expedition Cognition: a Solid Foundation for Adaptive Automation — Rapid advances in artificial intelligence are driving the adoption of robotics and automation in space and on Earth, providing new solutions for exploration and surveying, passenger transport, last-mile delivery, and automated warehouses. Nonetheless, humans will remain indispensable to supervise and manage such fleets, as humans and computers have complementary strengths. However, human operators’ capacities will be challenged and exceeded as task complexity and fleet size increase. The deployment of fleets of autonomous vehicles opens up transformational opportunities in space applications and on Earth. However, large-scale deployment is held back by safety and reliability of these systems, and a lack of personnel trained in this interdisciplinary research area.

The project’s main objectives are to establish generalizability of a machine learning (ML) algorithm between simple and complex cognitive tasks in a laboratory environment; to establish generalizability of this algorithm bet