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.