SA-Based Guidance to Aid UAV Swarm Supervisory Control: What do Experts Say?

Abstract

Accident reports reveal that incorrect Situation Awareness (SA) is often the cause of human errors in context of supervisory control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). Many of these errors can be attributed to inadequate scanning behaviour. In the future, the number of UAVs human operators have to supervise at the same time will increase. Thus, methods are needed, which could aid deficits in the scanning behaviour and SA. Our work focuses on the development of an assistance system for UAV swarm supervisory control, which optimizes the scanning behaviour of a human operator based on the analysis of actual SA needs. In this paper, we present the design of the assistance system and results of an early prototype evaluation performed with three experts from the perspectives usability, human factors and UAV manufacturing to get an impression of the expectable user acceptance, safety impact and market potential.