Safety considerations for small Unmanned Aerial Systems with distributed users

Abstract

Abstract-This paper identifies three categories of safety risks posed by allowing multiple users to engage with small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS) and offers five recommendations on how to reduce or mitigate these vulnerabilities. Data from sUAS can benefit multiple experts at a disaster who may not be familiar with robots or colocated with the pilot. Two different styles of interfaces have been developed and tested with responders conducting exercises to facilitate team coordination with a quadrotor at Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service's Disaster City R over a four year period. The two interfaces illustrate three distinct categories of safety concerns: unsafe control regimes, loss of situation awareness, and increased stress. Five recommendations are proposed to mitigate or eliminate the safety concerns: separate the payload camera from the platform, giving the pilot a dedicated "pilot-cam" and the experts a fully gimbaled payload; use artificial intelligence to resolve conflicts between competing directives from multiple experts; allow the pilot, or a software agent, to turn off the expert's ability to control or communication; use multi-modal warnings rather than rely on visual cues; and add guarded motion to prevent collisions.

A stakeholder framework for evaluating the ‐ilities of autonomous behaviors in complex adaptive systems

“…These interventions consist of any corrections needed to facilitate collision avoidance, navigation assistance, improved performance, fault management, and general system failures that impact swarm coordination. Most of these interventions and impacts come from safety concerns potentially caused by unstable control regimes within the environment, graphic user interface constraints, and general user cognitive loads 31 . After acquiring experience recovering from these issues with using the system over time, users will gain knowledge and experience to help them with future decisions and conflicts during the mission.…”