Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2015
City
Dayton
Abstract
Advances in miniaturized computer technology have made it possible for a single Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to complete its mission autonomously. This also sparked interest in having swarms of UAVs that are cooperating as a team on a single mission. The level of automation involved in the control of UAVswarms will also change the role of the human operator. That is, instead of manually controlling the movements of the individual UAVs, the system operator will need to perform higher-level mission management tasks. However, most ground control stations are still tailored to the control of single UAVs by portraying raw flight status data on cockpit-like instruments. In this paper, the ecological interface design paradigm is used to enhance the humanmachine interface of a ground control station to support mission management for UAV swarms. As a case study, a generic ground-surveillance mission with four UAVs is envisioned. A preliminary evaluation study with 10 participants showed that the enhanced interface successfully enables operators to control a swarm of four UAVs and to resolve failures during mission execution.
Repository Citation
Fuchs, C.,
Borst, C.,
de Croon, G.,
van Paassen, R.,
& Mulder, M.
(2015). An Ecological Approach to the Supervisory Control of UAV Swarms. 18th International Symposium on Aviation Psychology, 177-182.
https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/isap_2015/77
