Cooperative interface of a swarm of UAVs

TL;DR

This paper discusses designing a cooperative ground operator interface for UAV swarms that incorporates natural interaction modalities and workload management to improve single-operator control of complex missions.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-strategy interaction manager and a workload characterization approach for UAV swarm management interfaces.

Findings

Proposed a multi-strategy interaction management approach.

Illustrated workload characterization for operational situations.

Applied principles to the Smaart UAV prototype.

Abstract

After presenting the broad context of authority sharing, we outline how introducing more natural interaction in the design of the ground operator interface of UV systems should help in allowing a single operator to manage the complexity of his/her task. Introducing new modalities is one one of the means in the realization of our vision of next- generation GOI. A more fundamental aspect resides in the interaction manager which should help balance the workload of the operator between mission and interaction, notably by applying a multi-strategy approach to generation and interpretation. We intend to apply these principles to the context of the Smaart prototype, and in this perspective, we illustrate how to characterize the workload associated with a particular operational situation.