NtoM: a Concept of Operations for Pilots of Multiple Remotely Piloted Aircraft

Abstract

The concept of operations proposed here pursues the feasibility, from a human factors perspective, of having a single pilot/aircrew controlling several remotely piloted aircraft systems at once in non-segregated airspace. To meet such feasibility, this multitasking must be safe and not interfere with the job of the air traffic controllers due to delays or errors associated with parallel piloting. To that end, a set of measures at several levels is suggested, which includes workload prediction and balance, pilot activity monitoring, and a special emphasis on interface usability and the pilot's situational awareness. The concept relies greatly on the exploitation of the potential of Controller-Pilot Data Link Communications, anticipating future widespread implementation and full use. Experiments comparing the performance of the same pseudo-pilots before and after the implementation of part of the measures showed a decrease in the number of errors, oversights and subjective stress.

Dynamic Workload Management for Multi-RPAS Pilots

“…The overloaded multi-RPAS scenarios of these experiments were designed to find out the workload top threshold, detect monitoring needs and inspire measures in the workload management and the usability of the pilot interface. Some of these findings were later implemented, put to test in a second set of experiments, and their results described in [4]. This section describes the environment, the sample tasks conceived, the test scenarios and how the workload was represented.…”

“…Pilots select one of the flights in the NPI to load it in the GCS. The role of the NPI is to facilitate the task of controlling concurrent flights and detecting errors (further details in [4]).…”

“…The NtoM concept of operations (ConOps) was conceived to mitigate the possible impact that this parallel piloting could cause. It is under development at the moment of writing this document, but the proposal of the ConOps can be found in [4]. Although NtoM could offer several benefits in other scenarios, it is expected to provide the greatest profit by managing highly automated RPAS in non-segregated airspace.…”

Controller-Pilot Data Link Communications Display oriented to multiple Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems pilots

“…NtoM [9] is a suggestion of concept of operations (ConOps) that aims to improve the awareness, productivity and safety of Remotely Piloted Aircraft System (RPAS) pilots concurrently piloting several aircraft in non-segregated airspace. One of the main challenges to make such operations feasible is avoiding any impact on the work of the Air Traffic Controllers (ATC) due to delays, oversights or errors caused by that parallel piloting.…”