Awareness in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Operations

Despite the name Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), humans are integral to UAV operations. Since the UAV’s operator interface is the primary facilitator of human-vehicle communication and coordination, an effectively designed interface is critical for successful UAV operations. To design an effective interface, it is essential to first determine the information needs for both the human and UAV components of the UAV system. We present the Human-UAV Awareness Framework, which we developed to inform UAV system design by detailing what information components should be provided to the human through the operator interface and to the vehicles as part of their onboard systems. Since there are a variety of UAV system designs, including a number of different possible human-UAV control schemes, the paper outlines the particular types of information that would be needed for two possible UAV system contexts: a base case, which assumes one human controller and one UAV, and a general case, which assumes n human controllers and m UAVs. The paper discusses several practical considerations involved in applying the framework to UAV system design, including the level of automation of the UAVs, potential human-UAV control schemes, humans’ roles, and interaction with UAV stakeholders. INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or UAVs (which are more accurately called Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles,) are becoming critical to modern military command and control operations. The wide variety of UAVs—from a 50 gram AeroVironment Black Widow micro UAV to a 22,900 lb. Global Hawk high altitude, long endurance UAV—enable a range of sensor, and increasingly munitions, capabilities that facilitate a diverse set of missions (FAS, 2007). Beyond military operations, sheriffs and police departments are anxious to employ UAVs (Bowes, 2006), and the Tactical Aerospace Group of California, USA is offering unmanned helicopters for sale as crop dusters (TAG, 2007). Though “unmanned”, the success of a UAV mission relies heavily on human operators, humanhuman and human-machine communication, and coordination of human and machine activities. In a study by Tvaryanas et al. (2005), it was found that a significant number of the UAV mishaps that occurred over 10 years of U.S. Army, Air Force, and Navy/Marines UAV operations were due to human factors issues such as workload, attention, and crew coordination and communication. The UAV operator interface is the primary facilitator of the human-machine communication and coordination, and increasingly, of the human-human communication and coordination. Thus, designing an interface that provides an operator with an appropriate level of awareness of the activities of the UAV under his or her control and of the other operators involved in the mission is critical to help minimize information overload, distraction, miscommunications, and coordination breakdowns. While supporting operator awareness requires more than simply providing information, we maintain that understanding information needs is a critical prerequisite for providing appropriate awareness to human operators and intelligent systems. Unfortunately, few UAV-specific