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Utility of Functional Transparency and Usability in UAV Supervisory Control Interface Design

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Abstract

A basic notion of transparency in automated systems design is the need to support user tracking and understanding of system states. Many usability principles for complex systems design implicitly target the concept of transparency. In this study, we made comparison of a “baseline” control interface mimicking an existing available UAV ground control station with an “enhanced” interface designed with improved functional transparency and usability, and a “degraded” interface which removed important design features. Each participant was extensively trained in the use of one of the interfaces and all simulated UAV control tasks. Each participant was tested in four trials of a typical military concept of UAV operation with different mission maps and vehicle speeds. Results revealed participants using the enhanced interface to produce significantly faster task completion times and greater accuracy across all UAV control tasks. The enhanced features were also found to promote operator understanding of the system and mitigate workload. By defining and setting automation transparency as an overarching design objective and identifying specific transparency and usability issues within existing GCS designs, we weress able to design and prototype an enhanced interface that more effectively supported human-automation interaction. Automation transparency as a high-level design objective may be useful for expert designers; whereas, usability design guidelines, as “building blocks” to transparency, may be a useful tool for new system designers.

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Funding

This research was supported by a grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA Grant No. NNX16AB23A). Terry Fong was the technical monitor. The views and opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NASA.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dataminr, New York, NY, USA

    Wenjuan Zhang

  2. United States Military Academy, West Point, NY, USA

    David Feltner

  3. Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering, University of Florida, P.O. Box 116595, Gainesville, FL, 32611-6595, USA

    David Kaber

  4. NAVAIR, New Bern, NC, USA

    James Shirley

Authors
  1. Wenjuan Zhang
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  2. David Feltner
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  3. David Kaber
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  4. James Shirley
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Correspondence to Wenjuan Zhang or David Kaber.

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Research involving human participants

The institutional review board of North Carolina State University has approved this study. All participants were provided information on the objectives, procedure and potential risks related to the experiment and signed an informed consent form prior to testing.

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Zhang, W., Feltner, D., Kaber, D. et al. Utility of Functional Transparency and Usability in UAV Supervisory Control Interface Design. Int J of Soc Robotics 13, 1761–1776 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-021-00757-x

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