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This Defense Intelligence Reference Document, dated 15 December 2010, is a Defense Intelligence Agency report from its Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Applications (AAWSA) Program. It looks at how many unmanned spacecraft one human pilot could control during future deep-space missions, drawing on research into air traffic control and piloting of multiple unmanned vehicles. It concludes that the limits are about 16 craft for simple tasks, 7 for moderately complex tasks and 4 for complex mixed fleets. It adds that physiological measures can signal when an operator is overloaded.
UNCLASSIFIED//FIHl 8FFHil.tzk Wili &Hklf In an essential foundation study for introducing forms of augmentation to the ATC task, Wickens modeled the dual task environment of pilot traffic avoidance using alarms to augment detection of conflicts. The primary task was maintaining aircraft flightpath using a simulated cockpit display of a crosshair inside a box: the crosshair indicated aircraft direction and drifted toward the sides of the box if not corrected by the pilot using a joystick control. The drift rate was variable and could increase or decrease the difficulty of the primary task. The computer monitored for potential collisions and warned pilots if another aircraft was within 3 miles. Pilots were instructed to maintain their own aircraft flightpath first, and then detect conflicts. Upon alarm, the pilot was to examine an ATC display and recommend re- routing of the conflicting aircraft. Pilots were informed that the automated detection system may erroneously label some situations as conflicts; therefore the pilot needed to actually perform several ATC cognitive task functions to confirm the conflict before recommending action. Participants in the study were 12 student pilots. The results of this experiment showed that when augmentation was correct more than about 80% of the time, performance decreased due to decreased vigilance in confirming alarms properly on the ATC display. Additionally, with a high accuracy in the alarm rate, pilots did not regularly check the ATC display to ensure that the augmentation didn't miss possible conflicts. Auditory and visual binary alarms were presented and the auditory alarms were more effective and did not interfere with the primary task (visual tracking). The authors concluded that a 20-25% false alarm rate was optima In when it is intended for the pilot to work alongside the automation rather than rely on it. 42 The Wickens study was undertaken with the plan of moving ATC to a shared responsibility of the controller and pilot: the goal being to increase airspace capacity by removing some of the more mundane functions like en-route course correction and en- route conflict detection to primarily cockpit control. This situation would be analogous to a spacecraft pilot operating their primary vehicle manually while attending many semi- automated ancillary vehicles. Although not exactly the same, Landsdown studied TLX workload measures on drivers performing multiple in-vehicle tasks. The authors here concluded that secondary tasks significantly increased perceived workload in this arrangement of task control. 43 0 This noise in the signal is analogous to adjusting the squelch level on a CB radio: too high a setting and you miss traffic; too low a setting and all you hear is random noise. 17 UNCLASSIFIED,' }Flilll. IIFFll!l*L 1!1!11! 9HL I
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Report, from the dia collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 31 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.