Human-Integrated Supervisory Control of Uninhabited Combat Aerial Vehicles

Uninhabited aerial vehicles are aircraft without the onboard presence of pilot or aircrew. Even though the human is removed from the direct control of the aircraft, the human is typically involved in the process as a supervisor in a multiple task telerobotics control system. The supervisor must receive the appropriate information for efficient decision making and input the information required to augment the autonomous control of the vehicle as necessary. This article presents an approach that applies human operator modeling methods to perform semiotic analysis and identifies the content and form of the information required for effective supervisory control. This paper also outlines a computational modeling and simulation architecture that supports concurrent multi-user connectivity and reconfigurable user interfaces. The potential utilization of this architecture to systematically evaluate interface concepts and the role of automation in these systems is also described. Finally, an empirical evaluation is described that benchmarks the effectiveness of the architecture.Human-Integrated Supervisory Control of Uninhabited Combat Aerial Vehicles.