Boredom and Distraction in Multiple Unmanned Vehicle Supervisory Control

Abstract

Operators currently controlling Unmanned Aerial Vehicles report significant boredom, and such systems will likely become more automated in the future. Similar problems are found in process control, commercial aviation, and medical settings. To examine the effect of boredom in such settings, a long duration low task load experiment was conducted. Three low task load levels requiring operator input every 10, 20, or 30 minutes were tested in a four-hour study using a multiple unmanned vehicle simulation environment that leverages decentralized algorithms for sometimes imperfect vehicle scheduling. Reaction times to system-generated events generally decreased across the four hours, as did participants' ability to maintain directed attention. Overall, participants spent almost half of the time in a distracted state. The top performer spent the majority of time in directed and divided attention states.Unexpectedly, the second-best participant, only 1% worse than the top performer, was distracted almost one third of the experiment, but exhibited a periodic switching strategy, allowing him to pay just enough attention to assist the automation when needed. Indeed, four of the five top performers were distracted more than one-third of the time. These findings suggest that distraction due to boring, low task load environments can be effectively managed through efficient attention switching. Future work is needed to determine optimal frequency and duration of attention state switches given various exogenous attributes, as well as individual variability. These findings have implications for the design of and personnel selection for supervisory control systems where operators monitor highly automated systems for long durations with only occasional or rare input.

Irresponsibilities, inequalities and injustice for autonomous vehicles

“…Yet, on a practical note as the authors concede, 'it seems implausible that the otherwise idle user will be able to stay focused and searching for a possible risk of an accident which might occur on average once every 2 million kilometres or so' (Hevelke and Nida-Rümelin 2015). Research involving unmanned aerial vehicles in the military domain suggests that human boredom degrades both reaction times and the ability to maintain directed attention in oversight tasks (Cummings et al 2013) which corroborate this claim. Taken together, this undermines the prospect for capacity responsibility for the occupant human beings for the harms caused by their autonomous vehicles.…”

Pre-stimulus antero-posterior EEG connectivity predicts performance in a UAV monitoring task

“…Hence, these settings are challenging for the operators who ought to maintain sustained attention to be responsive and efficient at all times in such critical systems [1], [2]. Studies have shown that these task settings induce boredom which leads to divided attention and operators being distracted from the task [3], [4]. More specifically sustained attention is effortful [5] and its failures, which have been termed vigilance decrements, can lead to accidents especially when facing critical and unexpected situations [6].…”

Developing a feedback system to augment monitoring performance of aircraft pilots

“…Given the fact that human operators cannot supply visual attention to each visual display at the same time, they must periodically shift their visual attention between different information sources. While doing so, human operators might fall prey to a couple of demons distracting them from performing adequate monitoring behavior, such as boredom [4], attentional tunneling [5] or perservation [6].…”