Attention Allocation Efficiency in Human-UV Teams

Human operators in unmanned vehicle systems must divide their attention between multiple tasks. This is particularly true of systems that contain multiple unmanned vehicles. In such systems, long-term research goals include determining (a) what dictates how humans allocate their attention, (b) where humans should focus their attention, (c) what can system designers do, via decision support systems, etc., to direct their attention to the “right” places, and (d) how do we measure the efficiency of human attention allocation. As a step toward finding answers to these questions, we conducted a user study in which a single human controlled multiple simulated unmanned vehicles. In this paper, we discuss some of the lessons we learned from this user study with respect to human attention allocation. These conclusions are made by using metrics derived from users’ selection strategies and switching times.