Evaluation of Early Ground Control Station Configurations for Interacting with a UAS Traffic Management (UTM) System

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to report on a human factors evaluation of ground control station design concepts for interacting with an unmanned traffic management system. The data collected for this paper comes from recent field tests for NASA’s Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM) project, and covers the following topics; workload, situation awareness, as well as flight crew communication, coordination, and procedures. The goal of this evaluation was to determine if the various software implementations for interacting with the UTM system can be described and classified into design concepts to provide guidance for the development of future UTM interfaces. We begin with a brief description of NASA’s UTM project, followed by a description of the test range configuration related to a second development phase. We identified (post hoc) two classes in which the ground control stations could be grouped. This grouping was based on level of display integration. The analysis was exploratory and informal. It was conducted to compare ground stations across those two classes and against the aforementioned topics. Overall, subjective ratings showed no differences with respect to workload and communication, but ratings for situation awareness and effectiveness of the procedures favored integration of displays.