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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.
“Mission Control”7 pages
UNCLASSIFIED/ ,'l"e" Cl"l"!e1,it tl9E CHE I Chapter 6: Conclusions There is a lack of research in the area of cognitive limits on the number of spacecraft one pilot could control given any mission scenario. Two models for examining what are similar activities are air traffic control and remote piloting of multiple unmanned vehicles. We have shown the research progress in both areas, and the cognitive limits on the number of craft that can be simultaneously controlled are 16 for simple destination selection, 7 for moderately complex piloting and/or mission task completion, and 4 for complex heterogeneous craft. Future research may increase the automation component of aircraft and mission control, but there is no evidence to date that a complete mental picture can be maintained, even with external working memory augmentation, for more than about 16 objects at one time. We have additionally shown that physiological variables can be objectively employed to indicate overload. Nominal success has been achieved in classifying physiological states near high workload and thus able to predict and thus possibly prevent overload. We expect this classification will be achieved with near perfect accuracy within five years of specific studies being commenced. 23 UNCLASSIFIED//FQA: QFFICIOP 1!55 0111 ¥
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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.