Human-in-the-loop experiments design for workload effectiveness verification of multiple-UAV operators

Abstract

There is no doubt that advances in UAV technology have improved military performance. However, these advances require humans to adapt to new and complex operational systems. UAV has been rapidly expanding to a variety of fields such as reconnaissance, transportation, communication and aerial photographing recently. Also, with the development of UAV automation technology, one operator is able to supervisory-control multiple-UAVs. However, as the number of assigned UAV increases, the amount of information increases and this results in the workload of the operator increasing and deterioration in controlling performance. Accordingly, there is a need for a model to determine the level of overload an operator may encounter with regard to multiple-UAV but nationally this kind of research is currently lacking. Therefore, this paper provides an experimental platform for evaluating workload index effectiveness integrating multiple-UAV operational environments, GCS, and eye-tracking system followed by a limited survey of domestic and international studies of multi-UAV overload studies.