Comparing Situation Awareness for Two Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Human Interface Approaches

Our goal is to improve the design of humanUnmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) interaction so operators can have better situation awareness (SA) of conditions pertaining to the UAVs. We developed a UAV interaction design approach that uses pre-loaded terrain data to augment real-time video data sensed by the UAVs. We hypothesized that augmentation of the video in this manner would provide better SA than a video stream alone. To test the hypothesis, we performed a counterbalanced within-subjects experiment in which the independent variable was video presentation approach. Our results show an increase in comprehension of 3D spatial relationships between the UAV and points on the earth when experiment participants were given an augmented video presentation, as evidenced by a statistically significant difference in participants’ mapping accuracy. We believe our results will generalize to situations beyond UAVs to those situations in which people must monitor and comprehend real-time, map-based information.