Operator Informational Needs for Multiple Autonomous Small Vehicles

With the anticipated explosion of small unmanned aerial vehicles, it is highly likely that operators will be controlling fleets of autonomous vehicles. To fulfill the promise of autonomy, vehicle operators will not be concerned with manual control of the vehicle; instead, they will deal with the ove...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inNASA Center for AeroSpace Information (CASI). Conference Proceedings
Main Authors Trujillo, Anna C, Fan, Henry, Cross, Charles D, Hempley, Lucas E, Cichella, Venanzio, Puig-Navarro, Javier, Mehdi, Syed Bilal
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published Hampton NASA/Langley Research Center 26.07.2015
Subjects
Autonomy
Drone vehicles
Ground based control
Ground stations
Human factors
Manual control
Operators
R&D
Research & development
Search and rescue missions
Systems engineering
Trajectory control
Trajectory planning
Unmanned aerial vehicles
Vehicles
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Summary:With the anticipated explosion of small unmanned aerial vehicles, it is highly likely that operators will be controlling fleets of autonomous vehicles. To fulfill the promise of autonomy, vehicle operators will not be concerned with manual control of the vehicle; instead, they will deal with the overall mission. Furthermore, the one operator to many vehicles is becoming a constant meme with various industries including package delivery, search and rescue, and utility companies. In order for an operator to concurrently control several vehicles, his station must look and behave very differently than the current ground control station instantiations. Furthermore, the vehicle will have to be much more autonomous, especially during non-normal operations, in order to accommodate the knowledge deficit or the information overload of the operator in charge of several vehicles. The expected usage increase of small drones requires presenting the operational information generated by a fleet of heterogeneous autonomous agents to an operator. NASA Langley Research Center's Autonomy Incubator has brought together researchers in various disciplines including controls, trajectory planning, systems engineering, and human factors to develop an integrated system to study autonomy issues. The initial human factors effort is focusing on mission displays that would give an operator the overall status of all autonomous agents involved in the current mission. This paper will discuss the specifics of the mission displays for operators controlling several vehicles.