Dr. Martijn IJtsma

Dr. Martijn IJtsma

Assistant Professor at the Ohio State University

Current Projects

NSF CAREER: Making Robots More Cooperative Agents: Controlling Costs of Coordination Through Graph-Based Models of Joint Activity

The deployment of smart robots promises increased safety, productivity, and capability in domains such as disaster and emergency response, ground mobility, manufacturing, aviation, and space operations. Good human-robot collaboration is key to the realization of these promises. This project develops novel modeling techniques for analyzing and designing collaborative behavior in human-robot teams. Collaborative behavior requires adjusting and communicating with each other, thereby benefiting from participating in collaboration despite the cognitive and temporal costs of needing to coordinate with others. Such costs in human-robot collaboration can be high, as coordination with autonomous agents generally is more taxing and time-consuming than collaboration with other humans. The models developed as part of the award will help uncover the causes and effects of coordination costs in human-robot systems. Based on these models, the project develops techniques for managing coordination costs to avoid overloading human operators. Improved management of coordination costs will lead to more robust and resilient human-robot operations, broader adoption of smart robotic technologies, and realization of their promised benefits in a range of domains that are key to social welfare and national security. The project integrates education and outreach activities into the research for training the future workforce in systems thinking and interdisciplinary problem-solving skills. These skills will ready future engineers, researchers, and scientists to create integrated solutions in interdisciplinary environments to address complex engineering challenges that span technological, human, ecological, economic, and policy dimensions, among others.

Contingency Planning for Advanced Air Mobility (AAM)

This project, led by Mosaic ATM, works on building a Contingency Planning Toolkit for Advanced Air Mobility. Our role is to develop and apply novel modeling and simulation techniques for evaluating candidate architectures and identify requirements for distributed AAM contingency planning. Through fast-time simulation, we can identify what is necessary to (1) create feasible concepts of operations that create the desired outcomes, (2) conduct comparisons between different system architectures and strategies for responding to contingencies, and (3) identify where further resources need to be invested to improve the robustness of envisioned concepts.

Human-AI Teaming in Future Mobility

This collaboration with 99P Labs envisions new techniques for designing human-AI systems for future mobility. These techniques leverage ideas from functional modeling and graph theory to systematically reason about how different configurations of humans and AI capabilities create interdependence relationships that must be managed and supported through design. The project applies these techniques to the problem of replanning while en route, to envision how new machine capabilities can integrate with human cognitive processes around replanning to create a well-performing, integrated system.

Reliance on Automated or Complex Flight Deck Systems in Commercial Aircraft

This project’s objective is to develop methods for identifying and evaluating design characteristics of automated or complex system. Complex systems such as commercial aircraft, have many high vulnerabilities that can arise. These vulnerabilities may undermine flight crew performance when non-normal and abnormal events occur. The scope of this project is to provide the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) with recommendations regarding the evaluation process of flight deck systems.