Improving Human Ground Control Performance in Unmanned Aerial Systems

The use of Unmanned Aerial Systems, commonly called drones, is growing enormouslytoday. Applications that can benefit from the use of fleets of drones and a related human–machineinterface are emerging to ensure better performance and reliability. In particular, a fleet of dronescan become a valuable tool for monitoring a wide area and transmitting relevant information tothe ground control station. We present a human–machine interface for a Ground Control Stationused to remotely operate a fleet of drones, in a collaborative setting, by a team of multiple operators.In such a collaborative setting, a major interface design challenge has been to maximize the TeamSituation Awareness, shifting the focus from the individual operator to the entire group decisionmakers. We were especially interested in testing the hypothesis that shared displays may improvethe team situation awareness and hence the overall performance. The experimental study wepresent shows that there is no difference in performance between shared and non-shared displays.However, in trials when unexpected events occurred, teams using shared displays-maintained goodperformance whereas in teams using non-shared displays performance reduced. In particular, in caseof unexpected situations, operators are