Management of Multiple Dynamic Human Supervisory Control Tasks for UAVs

Network-centric operations, in which multiple human and computer-based agents are linked in order to leverage information superiority, will bring increases in available information sources, volume of information and operational tempo, all of which will place higher cognitive demands on operators. This is an especially critical problem for operators who will be attempting to control multiple vehicles, which could be ground, air, or underwater-based. This paper will illustrate that when modeling the number of vehicles a single operator can control, it is important to model the sources of wait times, especially since these times could potentially lead to system failure. Specifically, these sources of vehicle wait times include interaction wait time, queues for multiple vehicles, and loss of situation awareness. In addition, it is critical to incorporate wait times that are incurred as a function of switching costs between tasks. The conflict between focusing on primary tasks, monitoring for alerts, and switching attention to emergent tasks is a fundamental problem for operators attempting to supervise multiple robots or autonomous vehicles. With the primary focus on the concept of wait times, this paper will discuss recent efforts to model operator capacity for management of multiple vehicles, outline a basic framework for modeling wait time, and discuss how these elements relate to the ability of a human to control multiple UAVs.