Inverting the Operator/Vehicle Ratio: Approaches to Next Generation UAV Command and Control

A key obstacle in the growth of unmanned vehicle operations is the number of operators required to supervise and control an unmanned vehicle. New unmanned vehicle CONOPS call for an individual or small groups of tightly integrated operators to control several vehicles simultaneously. This push to invert the classic operator/vehicle ratio cannot be achieved solely by increasing the intelligence and autonomy of the vehicle system. The human workload challenges must be overcome through new human-system interaction techniques. Ongoing work in human-machine interaction has generated paradigms of management-byconsent and management-by-exception that help reduce the operator workload bottleneck. In addition, advances in human alerting and multi-modal interface design have made human-system interfaces more intuitive and easier to use. Together, these mechanisms form an effective solution to the unmanned vehicle command and control interface. In this paper, we will describe paradigms for human control of next-generation unmanned vehicle systems, the technologies that will be required to realize them, and the research results that are addressing those requirements.