Exploring the Interface to Aid the Operator’s Situation Awareness in Supervisory Control of Multiple Drones

No Thumbnail Available
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Perustieteiden korkeakoulu | Master's thesis
Date
2023-01-23
Department
Major/Subject
Human-Computer Interaction and Design
Mcode
SCI3020
Degree programme
Master's Programme in ICT Innovation
Language
en
Pages
37 + 3
Series
Abstract
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly called drones, have been applied in manifold fields recently. With the development of UAV autonomy, the next generation of drone applications is moving towards team-based, multi-drone operations. This also promotes the transition of the operator role to the supervisory control of multiple UAVs. Situation awareness (SA) is a significant concept in this aspect to evaluate human performance in complex systems. This thesis work proposes a human-system interface for monitoring multiple autonomous UAVs simultaneously by a single operator and investigates how to decrease the impact of task switching among different UAVs on the operator’s SA. Tasks in the context of fleet mission control are defined to be of different levels of urgency. Several design strategies have been concluded to address the research question. In conclusion, the usage of similar interface layouts between different tasks is effective to generally decrease the impact of task switching. The alert system with appropriate design is a specific factor in mitigating the impact of task switching towards higher urgency tasks/interfaces. Moreover, the reasonable division of areas of the interface and proper presentation of information by their importance are significant, especially for task switching towards lower urgency tasks/interfaces.
Description
Supervisor
Li, Haibo
Thesis advisor
Windlin, Charles
Keywords
human-system Interface, ground control system, multi-drone, supervisory control, situation awareness, task switching
Other note
Citation