Flexible Authority Allocation in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

The Ground Control Station (GCS) is a critical element in the control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The information provided by the GCS influences the operator's Situational Awareness (SA). In order to explore the consequences of authority on operator SA and overall performance, this research investigated the desired authority of two operator support functions that perform conflict detection and resolution in the time-critical domain. In the experiment, the Level of Authority (LoA) of these two functions was varied. Results show that, independent of the LoA, in many cases, the operator was able to detect a possible conflict before the conflict prediction function became active. This indicated that the operator had sufficient level 3 SA (projection of current state into the future) to detect the need for a tactical action. However, results also show a significant amount of unnecessary operator interventions. Finally, the results show that in many situations the operator did not have enough level 3 SA to come up with a good solution for a possible conflict and performance would have been better without operator intervention.

Mitigation of Conflicts with Automation

“…In these domains, automation is crucial because the human operator is not embedded within the system (Tvaryanas, 2004), and hazardous events may interfere with human-robot interactions (e.g., communication breakdown and latencies). The design of authority sharing is therefore critical (Inagaki, 2003) because conflict between the robot and human operator could seriously compromise mission success (Parasuraman & Wickens, 2008;Van Ginkel, de Vries, Koeners, & Theunissen, 2006). Such problems have motivated researchers (Meyer, 2001;Parasuraman & Wickens, 2008;Rice, 2009) to study imperfect diagnostic automation (i.e., miss-prone vs. false alarm-prone automation).…”

Cognitive conflict in human–automation interactions: A psychophysiological study

“…This cooperation breakdown can lead to accidents with an airworthy airplane where the crew persists in solving a minor conflict (Billings, 1996) "instead of switching to another means or a more direct means to accomplish their flight path management goals" (Woods and Sarter, 2000, p. 347), and this can occur despite the onset of auditory alarms (Beringer and Harris, 1999). Such hazardous situations are not only relevant in aviation but also in the context of human supervisory control of unmanned vehicles (UVs) where careless design of authority sharing (Inagaki, 2003) degrades the human operator's performance leading to inadequate behaviors (Parasuraman and Wickens, 2008;Van Ginkel et al, 2006). Moreover, some authors (Meyer, 2001;Parasuraman and Wickens, 2008;Rice, 2009) revealed that unreliable diagnostic automation (i.e.…”