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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/ ,'F811. 8FFll!l*L 1!1!11! l!IIU:!Y Chapter 5: Discussion We have insight into the maximum number of tracked objects in a multiple space vehicle piloting experiment: it depends greatly on the complexity of the piloting and mission tasks. Brookings showed that in the ATC task, mild complexity affected performance even for a little as six planes being tracked by professional controllers, whereas these controllers regularly track up to ten. Ruff showed that when there is uncertainty in the augmentation system, a maximum of four craft can be controlled and tasked to complete missions. The number of four is consistent with standard estimates of human working memory being able to handle three to five disparate objects at a time. This implies that disparate, complex interfaces require resources from working memory to prevent loss of the big picture. Augmentation of the human capabilities mainly appears to be helping to maintain a higher number of working memory registers. Whether it is the handwritten blocks for the ATCs, the stored instructions for the Dixon study, or the dual displays of Cummings, the most effective augmentations in the studies above hold information for quick visual retrieval that the brain would otherwise keep in working memory. Any external automation system to assist the operator in making decisions will have an associated error rate. It was also shown in the ATC and piloting tasks that alerts need to contain a level of noise (false alarms) of 20-25% to avoid automation bias. Regarding where the future of this work is headed, it is certain that the field is just getting started. Apollo spacecraft required dozens of ground operators to monitor for system failures, and just a few years ago it required two soldiers to operate a simple reconnaissance drone (most of them still do). It is fortunate that ATC and UAV control appear to be extremely applicable to the initial direction of remote space vehicle operations. The 5-year timeframe should see spacecraft-specific simulator studies begin to appear in major peer-reviewed journals. The major advance to come in developing augmented human capability to pilot multiple spacecraft will be in understanding the cognitive organization of multitasking. With brain imaging it has been shown that multiple resource theory seems to follow the anatomical organization of the brain. In the next 40 years we will find out why the functional studies in multiple task completion don't seem to follow the predictions of multiple resource theory. 22 UNCLASSIFIED//F81it 8FFIIIAI!: 1!181! &••1::Y
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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.