Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to report on a human factors evaluation of ground control station design concepts for interacting with an unmanned traffic management system. The data collected for this paper comes from recent field tests for NASA’s Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM) project, and covers the following topics; workload, situation awareness, as well as flight crew communication, coordination, and procedures. The goal of this evaluation was to determine if the various software implementations for interacting with the UTM system can be described and classified into design concepts to provide guidance for the development of future UTM interfaces. We begin with a brief description of NASA’s UTM project, followed by a description of the test range configuration related to a second development phase. We identified (post hoc) two classes in which the ground control stations could be grouped. This grouping was based on level of display integration. The analysis was exploratory and informal. It was conducted to compare ground stations across those two classes and against the aforementioned topics. Overall, subjective ratings showed no differences with respect to workload and communication, but ratings for situation awareness and effectiveness of the procedures favored integration of displays.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
FAA: FAA Aerospace Forecasts. https://www.faa.gov/data_research/aviation/aerospace_forecasts/
Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Service Demand 2015–2035 Literature Review & Projections of Future Usage, Cambridge, MA (2013)
Kopardekar, P., Rios, J., Prevot, T., Johnson, M., Jung, J., Robinson, J.E.I.: Unmanned aircraft system traffic management (UTM) concept of operations. Am. Inst. Aeronaut. Astronaut. (2016)
Prevot, T., Mercer, J., Martin, L., Homola, J., Cabrall, C.D., Brasil, C.L.: Evaluation of high density air traffic operations with automation for separation assurance, weather avoidance and schedule conformance. In: Proceedings of the 11th AIAA Aviation Technology, Integration, and Operation (ATIO) Including AIA (2011)
Prevot, T., Homola, J., Mercer, J.: From rural to urban environments: human/systems simulation research for low altitude UAS Traffic Management (UTM). In: Proceeding of the 16th AIAA Aviation Technology, Integration, and Operations Conference Washington, DC, 13–17 June, pp. 1–13 (2016)
Homola, J., Prevot, T., Mercer, J., Bienert, N., Gabriel, C.: UAS traffic management (UTM) simulation capabilities and laboratory environment, pp. 1–7 (2016)
Johnson, M., Jung, J., Rios, J., Mercer, J., Homola, J., Prevot, T., Mulfinger, D., Kopardekar, P.: Flight test evaluation of a traffic management concept for unmanned aircraft systems in a rural environment. In: Twelfth USA/Europe Air Traffic Management Research and Development Seminar (ATM 2017) (2017)
Acknowledgements
We extend our gratitude to all of the flight crews who participated in TCL 2 for their patience and support of the UTM human factors effort.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG(outside the USA)
About this paper
Cite this paper
Dao, AQ.V. et al. (2018). Evaluation of Early Ground Control Station Configurations for Interacting with a UAS Traffic Management (UTM) System. In: Chen, J. (eds) Advances in Human Factors in Robots and Unmanned Systems. AHFE 2017. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 595. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60384-1_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60384-1_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-60383-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-60384-1
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)