Human Factors Considerations in Migration of Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) Operator Control

Abstract

Unmanned aircraft system (UAS) operator control can be migrated within temporal, physical, and functional domains. Although such control migrations occur in current UAS operations, there are no human factors studies specifically addressing this issue in UASs. This work sought to identify reasons for migrating UAS operator control and summarize the human factors literature with inferential bearing on this topic. Migration of UAS operator control is necessary to overcome limitations of the human operator, current technology, or both. There are potential advantages to control migration to include mitigating operator vigilance decrements and fatigue, facilitating operator task specialization, and optimizing workload during multi-aircraft and payload control tasks. However, there are also significant disadvantages to include transient degraded operator situational and systems awareness and more complex and potentially distributed teams of operators. Future work should focus on improving the empirical knowledge base on UAS human factors so evidence-based recommendations can be made when incorporating control migration in UAS design and operations.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Feb 01, 2006
Accession Number
ADA444925

Entities

People

  • Anthony P. Tvaryanas

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Autonomy
  • Space
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Aircrafts
  • Control Systems
  • Ground Control Stations
  • Human Factors Engineering
  • Human Systems Integration
  • Information Processing
  • Military Operations
  • Psychology
  • Remotely Piloted Vehicles
  • Situational Awareness
  • Supervisory Control
  • Target Detection
  • Unmanned Aerial Systems
  • Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
  • Vehicles
  • Workload

Readers

  • Aerial Unmanned Vehicle Swarm Micro Periodontal Dentistry.
  • Parallel and Distributed Computing.
  • Team-Based Human-Centered Cognitive Task Decision Making and Information Performance.

Technology Areas

  • Autonomy
  • Autonomy - Autonomous System Control
  • Autonomy - Human-Robot Interaction