Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) Delegation of Separation in NextGen Airspace

The purpose of this thesis was to determine the feasibility of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) performing delegated separation in the national airspace system (NAS). Delegated separation is the transfer of responsibility for maintaining separation between aircraft or vehicles from air navigation service providers to the relevant pilot or flight operator. The effects of delegated separation and traffic display information level were collected through performance, workload, and situation awareness measures. The results of this study showed benefits related to the use of conflict detection alerts being shown on the UAS operator\u27s cockpit situation display (CSD) and to the use of full delegation. Overall, changing the level of separation responsibility and adding conflict detection alerts on the CSD were not found to have an adverse effect on performance as shown by the low amounts of losses of separation. The use of conflict detection alerts on the CSD and full delegation responsibilities given to the UAS operator were found to create significantly reduced workload, significantly increased situation awareness and significantly easier communications between the UAS operator and air traffic controller without significantly increasing the amount of losses of separation

Effect of Automation Level on Cognitive Workload when Collaborating with a Robotic Assistant

Manufacturing robotics have been used for decades to perform repetitive tasks, or tasks that require increased levels of speed, strength, or precision to meet production and specification requirements. Determining the appropriate degree of automation for both the human and robot collaborative team members is critical to optimize production as well as user experience. If the degree of automation is too high, the human will be out of the loop which can result in the loss of situational awareness and be detrimental to intervention time and accuracy. If the degree of automation is too low, then the human may experience greater than necessary cognitive workloads resulting in fatigue. In this experiment, the human team member performed a typing task while the robot team member performed a pick and place task. The human remained in a supervisory role to the robot’s actions. As the degree of automation increased, objective and subjective measurements of the cognitive effect were collected. 30 participants aged 18-44 years were divided between two levels of automation. Group one (n=15) participated in the decision support variation of the experiment. The human team member typed from provided literature while they supervised the Universal Robot performing a pick and place task. The robot then initiated movement to pick up the object when the human pressed a button. Group two participated in the automatic execution variation of the experiment in which the robot executed all movements automatically, without input from the human operator. The robot performed the pick task when an object was detected by a photelectric switch. In each scenario, an error was presented on the 5th, 9th, 15th, and 19th production cycle requiring the human to intervene. Time measurements were collected at this juncture to determine how the human reacted to an unexpected situation at each level of automation. The Subjective Workload Assessment Technique (SWAT) (Luximon & Goonetilleke, 2001) was used to measure the perceived cognitive workload for each participant. Time data were collected for the production cycle and intervention. Typed words per minute were collected and compared to each participant’s control. T-tests were used to analyze the mean time within groups comparing the control words per minute to the treatment words per minute. Additionally, t-tests were used to analyze mean time between groups in the following areas, time to complete twenty cycles, intervention time, and words per minute. Two hypotheses were developed which results were measured against. The first hypothesis is that the automatic execution operators will be out of the loop while engrossed in the typing task and take more time to notice the error, understand the problem, correct the problem, and return the system to homeostasis than decision support operators. The experiment results did not fully support this hypothesis, but they did reveal that the increased level of automation completed 20 cycles significantly (p \u3c 0.0001) faster mean time 9.57 min (SD 0.2 x 10-3) than the lower level of automation with a mean time 10.25 min SD 0.2 x 10-4. The second hypothesis is that automatic execution operators will be faster and more accurate in word processing and have lower subjective workload ratings than decision support operators. This hypothesis was not supported in the experiment results which revealed nearly significant (p = 0.07) higher levels of cognitive effort in higher levels of automation (57.5%) than in the lower level of automation (45.3%) (SD 2.0). However, no significant differences were found for word processing time or errors. The results of this study suggest that as automation increases overall production outcomes increase, but so does mental workload. This may help researchers and automation designers understand the relationship between cognitive workload, performance, and levels of automation within a human robotic collaborative team (HRC)

Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) Delegation of Separation in NextGen Airspace

The purpose of this study was to determine the feasibility of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) performing delegated separation in the national airspace system (NAS). Delegated separation is the transfer of responsibility for maintaining separation between aircraft or vehicles from air navigation service providers to the relevant pilot or flight operator. The effects of delegated separation and traffic display information level were collected through performance, workload, and situation awareness measures. The results of this study show benefits related to the use of conflict detection alerts being shown on the UAS operator's cockpit situation display (CSD), and to the use of full delegation. Overall, changing the level of separation responsibility and adding conflict detection alerts on the CSD was not found to have an adverse effect on performance as shown by the low amounts of losses of separation. The use of conflict detection alerts on the CSD and full delegation responsibilities given to the UAS operator were found to create significantly reduced workload, significantly increased situation awareness and significantly easier communications between the UAS operator and air traffic controller without significantly increasing the amount of losses of separation

Optimizing The Design Of Multimodal User Interfaces

Due to a current lack of principle-driven multimodal user interface design guidelines, designers may encounter difficulties when choosing the most appropriate display modality for given users or specific tasks (e.g., verbal versus spatial tasks). The development of multimodal display guidelines from both a user and task domain perspective is thus critical to the achievement of successful human-system interaction. Specifically, there is a need to determine how to design task information presentation (e.g., via which modalities) to capitalize on an individual operator\u27s information processing capabilities and the inherent efficiencies associated with redundant sensory information, thereby alleviating information overload. The present effort addresses this issue by proposing a theoretical framework (Architecture for Multi-Modal Optimization, AMMO) from which multimodal display design guidelines and adaptive automation strategies may be derived. The foundation of the proposed framework is based on extending, at a functional working memory (WM) level, existing information processing theories and models with the latest findings in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and other allied sciences. The utility of AMMO lies in its ability to provide designers with strategies for directing system design, as well as dynamic adaptation strategies (i.e., multimodal mitigation strategies) in support of real-time operations. In an effort to validate specific components of AMMO, a subset of AMMO-derived multimodal design guidelines was evaluated with a simulated weapons control system multitasking environment. The results of this study demonstrated significant performance improvements in user response time and accuracy when multimodal display cues were used (i.e., auditory and tactile, individually and in combination) to augment the visual display of information, thereby distributing human information processing resources across multiple sensory and WM resources. These results provide initial empirical support for validation of the overall AMMO model and a sub-set of the principle-driven multimodal design guidelines derived from it. The empirically-validated multimodal design guidelines may be applicable to a wide range of information-intensive computer-based multitasking environments

An Evaluation of RTA Symbols to Improve Pilot Situation Awareness

The purpose of this study was to evaluate different types of temporal guidance symbol sets in 4]Dimensional displays. Different displays were evaluated using situation awareness (SA) as a dependent measure. Participants were a mixture of non]pilots and pilots with an average flight time of 155 hours. All 24 participants were randomly assigned to their experimental condition. Objective SA data was collected during the experiment. After the experiment, each participant completed a subjective questionnaire. No significance was found between the pilots and non-pilots. No significance was found between types of displays. And, no interaction was found between groups

The Impact of Automation and Stress on Human Performance in UAV Operation

The United States Air Force (USAF) has increasing needs for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operators. Automation may enable a single operator to manage multiple UAVs at the same time. Multi-UAV operation may require a unique set of skills and the need for new operators calls for targeting new populations for recruitment. The objective of this research is to develop a simulation environment for studying the role of individual differences in UAV operation under different task configurations and investigate predictors of performance and stress. Primarily, the study examined the impact of levels of automation (LOAs), as well as task demands, on task performance, stress and operator reliance on automation. Two intermediate LOAs were employed for two surveillance tasks included in the simulation of UAV operation. Task demand was manipulated via the high and low frequency of events associated with additional tasks included in the simulation. The task demand and LOA manipulations influenced task performance generally as expected. The task demand manipulations elicited higher subjective distress and workload. LOAs did not affect operator workload but affected reliance behavior. Also, this study examined the role of individual differences in simulated UAV operation. A variety of individual difference factors were associated with task performance and with subjective stress response. Video gaming experience was linked to lower distress and better performance, suggesting possible transfer of skills. Some gender differences were revealed in stress response, task performance, but all the gender effects became insignificant with gaming experience controlled. Generally, the effects of personality were consistent with previous studies, except some novel findings with the performance metrics. Additionally, task demand was found to moderate the influence of personality factors on stress response and performance metrics. Specifically, conscientiousness was associated with higher subjective engagement and performance when demands were higher. This study supports future research which aims to improve the dynamic interfaces in UAV operation, optimize operator reliance on automation, and identify individuals with the highest aptitude for multi-UAV control

A study of human-agent collaboration for multi-UAV task allocation in dynamic environments

We consider a setting where a team of humans oversee the coordination of multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to perform a number of search tasks in dynamic environments that may cause the UAVs to drop out. Hence, we develop a set of multi-UAV supervisory control interfaces and a multi-agent coordination algorithm to support human decision making in this setting. To elucidate the resulting interactional issues, we compare manual and mixed-initiative task allocation in both static and dynamic environments in lab studies with 40 participants and observe that our mixed initiative system results in lower workloads and better performance in re-planning tasks than one which only involves manual task allocation. Our analysis points to new insights into the way humans appropriate flexible autonomy

The Effects of Automation Transparency and Reliability on Task Shedding and Operator Trust

Because automation use is common in many domains, understanding how to design it to optimize human-automation system performance is vital. Well-calibrated trust ensures good performance when using imperfect automation. Two factors that may jointly affect trust calibration are automation transparency and perceived reliability. Transparency information that explains automated processes and analyses to the operator may help the operator choose appropriate times to shed task control to automation. Because operator trust is positively correlated with automation use, behaviors such as task shedding to automation can indicate the presence of trust. This study used a 2 (reliability; between) × 3 (transparency; within) split-plot design to study the effects that reliability and amount of transparency information have on operators’ subjective trust and task shedding behaviors. Results showed a significant effect of reliability on trust, in which high reliability resulted in more trust. There was no effect of transparency on trust. There was no effect of either reliability or transparency on task shedding frequency or time to task shed. This may be due to high workload of the primary task, restricting participants’ ability to utilize transparency information beyond the automation recommendation. Another influence on these findings was participant hesitance to task shed which could have influenced behavior regardless of automation reliability. These findings contribute to the understanding of automation trust and operator task shedding behavior. Consistent with literature, reliability increased trust. However, there was no effect of transparency, demonstrating the complexity of the relationship between transparency and trust. Participants demonstrated a bias to retain personal control, even with highly reliable automation and at the cost of time-out errors. Future research should examine the relationship between workload and transparency and the influence of task importance on task shedding

Assessing V and V Processes for Automation with Respect to Vulnerabilities to Loss of Airplane State Awareness

Automation has contributed substantially to the sustained improvement of aviation safety by minimizing the physical workload of the pilot and increasing operational efficiency. Nevertheless, in complex and highly automated aircraft, automation also has unintended consequences. As systems become more complex and the authority and autonomy (A&A) of the automation increases, human operators become relegated to the role of a system supervisor or administrator, a passive role not conducive to maintaining engagement and airplane state awareness (ASA). The consequence is that flight crews can often come to over rely on the automation, become less engaged in the human-machine interaction, and lose awareness of the automation mode under which the aircraft is operating. Likewise, the complexity of the system and automation modes may lead to poor understanding of the interaction between a mode of automation and a particular system configuration or phase of flight. These and other examples of mode confusion often lead to mismanaging the aircraft"TM"s energy state or the aircraft deviating from the intended flight path. This report examines methods for assessing whether, and how, operational constructs properly assign authority and autonomy in a safe and coordinated manner, with particular emphasis on assuring adequate airplane state awareness by the flight crew and air traffic controllers in off-nominal and/or complex situations