An intelligent SA-adaptive interface to aid supervisory control of a UAV swarm

Abstract

Building and maintaining Situation Awareness (SA) during supervisory control of a swarm of highly automated Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) is a complex and visually demanding process, which is often affected by weak scanning behaviors of the human operators. As a consequence severe errors, such as incorrect decisions, are likely to occur. This paper presents an Intelligent SA-Adaptive Interface (ISAAI) for supervisory control of a UAV swarm, which aims at optimizing the scanning behavior of a human operator with regard to his/her actual SA-needs. Therefore, the ISAAI integrates an eye movement based technique to assess human operator SA during mission execution and a technique for guiding visual attention to relevant but unattended information.