Assisting interruption recovery in supervisory control of multiple UAVs

Abstract

Performance degradation due to interruptions is a critical issue, particularly when people are supervising highly autonomous systems in time and safety critical environments. Previous research in the development of automated support to help supervisory control operators resume task activities after an interruption has had limited success. This paper describes two new interruption recovery approaches that attempt to mitigate the disadvantages of previous approaches. In particular, this paper describes the design and initial investigation of a prototype assistive interface developed to support interruption recovery for supervisory control of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). These two 'replay'-type interruption recovery approaches enable increased user-control of the event discovery process and provide event 'bookmarks' to highlight emergent system events. The findings from this initial study provide several recommendations for the future design of interruption assistance tools for human supervisory control tasks.

Modeling task transitions to help designing for better situation awareness

“…To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. EICS ' after an interruption [26]. However, we identified certain types of transitions between tasks that were not addressed in the literature.…”

Improving awareness of automated actions using an interactive event timeline

“…Graphical interactive event timelines with the ability to replay past events have been previously shown to reduce response time and improve decision accuracy after interruptions in dynamic environments [6,7]. In this paper, we propose the use of similar interactive event timelines that support exploration and analysis of game history to improve situation awareness of both automated system actions and actions by players.…”

Guidelines and Caveats for Manipulating Expectancies in Experiments Involving Human Participants

“…Ho et al (2007) in their study involving a driving simulator have used the term 'critical event' to refer to a lead car suddenly decelerating requiring immediate brake response from the participant. Scott et al (2006) described a critical event as an emergent threat in a UAV supervisory control task. Sowb and Loeb (2002) use the term 'critical incident' to refer to various events during surgery potentially associated with preventable judgement errors capable of causing fatalities.…”