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This Defense Intelligence Reference Document, DIA-08-1101-001, is dated 15 December 2010. The Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense Warning Office produced it under the Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Applications program. It asks how many unmanned spacecraft one pilot could control in a future deep-space fleet, drawing on air traffic control and multiple unmanned vehicle research. It concludes the limits are about 16 craft for simple tasks, 7 for moderately complex ones and 4 for complex heterogeneous craft. It adds that physiological measures can signal operator overload.
From the source:Release of 2026-09-18 Incident: 12/15/10, Las Vegas, Nevada. Released with redactions. This document is a Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD), a technical reference format used by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to capture baseline knowledge on a specific topic for later analytic use. DIRDs are best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research. It is one of 38 DIRDs produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) between 2009 and 2011. Because AAWSAP’s scope permitted a broad range of supporting topics, not every DIRD in the series directly concerns aerospace systems or future threat assessment. The following summary reflects the DIRD’s scope and framing at the time of writing and should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed. This DIRD examines how many unmanned spacecraft a single human operator could realistically supervise or control at once, using research from air traffic control and multi-vehicle remote piloting as rough analogs. The report argues that the practical limit depends heavily on task complexity: about 16 craft for simple monitoring or destination assignment, about 7 for moderately complex piloting or mission tasks, and about 4 for complex heterogeneous operations. It places particular emphasis on the operator’s ability to maintain a coherent mental “big picture” of multiple vehicles at once, and it suggests that automation and external displays can help by offloading working-memory demands, though not eliminating them. The document also highlights physiological workload measures as a possible way to detect or predict operator overload in real time. Overall, it presents multi-spacecraft control as a human-factors and systems-integration problem in which progress depends on managing cognitive limits through interface design, automation, and workload monitoring.
UNCLASSIFIED/ /FOR OFFICl"L 891!! er~tY Chapter 4: Studies in Command of Multiple Semi Automated Vehicles Another analogue to remotely commanding several spacecraft is piloting or supervising operation of several unmanned ground or air vehicles (UGVs and UAVs). The primary use of these scenarios is in military operations which imposed additional criteria on the control system. Examples of several UAVs and their primary missions are shown in Figure 6. Control of vehicles can be either in-theater, at a range of yards to 10's of miles, or from a long-range command and control center, such as the Predator reconnaissance in the Iraq or Afghan Theater executed from bases within the continental United States. In addition to single vehicle control systems, UAV swarms are being developed. In this scenario a remote pilot executes a command to the swarm which communicates amongst itself to establish, for example, an RF emitter target location. 44 In this type of a control system the raw number of vehicles under one pilot's control can dramatically increase, but the number of swarms then takes the place of the number of vehicles in developing big picture cognitive limits. Such systems are also under development for space exploration. 45 In 2005, the US Army was operating two tactical surveillance UAVs: the Hunter and its newer replacement, the Shadow. Each UAV requires a team of two operators. Dixon studied the workload of Hunter/Shadow operators and with the help of SMEs designed a simulation to determine if augmentation systems could increase the number of aircraft controlled per pilot from one-half to two. Pilots were responsible for mission completion (reconnaissance of a command target area), locating targets of opportunity (TOO), and on-board system monitoring. There were three levels of pilot aircraft control: baseline, autoalert, and autopilot. In the first two conditions, operators controlled the flight of the aircraft using a joystick to indicate direction; altitude and airspeed were help constant, while a computer controlled the remaining flight parameters (pitch, bank, etc.). Occasionally pilots needed to compensate for wind changes. In the autopilot condition, operators entered the final coordinates of the next command target and the aircraft proceeded in a straight line, compensating automatically for wind changes. Pilots flew 10 straight flight legs. At the beginning of each leg, the command target was identified and instructions on what to locate were given. If the pilot forgot the instructions, they could hit a "repeat" button. At the end of each leg, high-workload tasks of loitering and zoom/pan the onboard camera to visualize the entire command target were executed. Along each leg between command targets, pilots were instructed to search for TOOs. Primary task completion included locating all relevant information about the command target. Secondary task completion included TOO identification and monitoring for an on-board system failure. The autoalert condition detected system failures and produced an audio alert when the command target was reached. Results showed that the autoalert augmentation dramatically decreased the time to locate system failures, as well as significantly decreasing the number of requested inst ruction repeats. Also, the autopilot augmentation dramatically decreased both flightpath deviation and the requested number of repeats, and also dramatically increased the number of TOO detections. Results were similar for the single and dual aircraft scenarios, though some performance, notably TOO detection (92% to 79%), did UNCLASSIFIED/ /EOR OFFICiI.\k W&li 8Ptl¥ 18
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Official release, from the pursue 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.