Abstract
The use of Unmanned Aerial Systems, commonly called drones, is growing enormously today. Applications that can benefit from the use of fleets of drones and a related human–machine interface are emerging to ensure better performance and reliability. In particular, a fleet of drones can become a valuable tool for monitoring a wide area and transmitting relevant information to the ground control station. We present a human–machine interface for a Ground Control Station used to remotely operate a fleet of drones, in a collaborative setting, by a team of multiple operators. In such a collaborative setting, a major interface design challenge has been to maximize the Team Situation Awareness, shifting the focus from the individual operator to the entire group decision-makers. We were especially interested in testing the hypothesis that shared displays may improve the team situation awareness and hence the overall performance. The experimental study we present shows that there is no difference in performance between shared and non-shared displays. However, in trials when unexpected events occurred, teams using shared displays-maintained good performance whereas in teams using non-shared displays performance reduced. In particular, in case of unexpected situations, operators are able to safely bring more drones home, maintaining a higher level of team situational awareness.
Highlights
Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), commonly known as drones, are being employed in more and more civilian settings, from crowd-monitoring activities, to road traffic control, to agricultural crop monitoring
The results show that the shared displays do not universally improve team performance, but they help maintain performance in off-nominal situations
The purpose of this study is to carry out predictions derived from the situation awareness of the team operating the ground control station that sharing displays between team members would improve team performance
Summary
Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), commonly known as drones, are being employed in more and more civilian settings, from crowd-monitoring activities, to road traffic control, to agricultural crop monitoring. The number of civil applications where UAS can be both effectively and efficiently used has increased in recent years, thanks to a considerable reduction in costs. UAS can be remotely piloted (RPAS—Remotely Piloted Aircraft System) or they can automatically fly. As a single powerful UAS equipped with a large array of different sensors is limited to a single point of view, in recent years, the multi-UAS paradigm seems to be a more suitable approach for many applications requiring the observation of wider areas. One of the emerging areas of the civilian use of UAS is public safety and services [1].
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