On enhanced situational awareness models for Unmanned Aerial Systems

Future Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs) are required to automate an increasing number of functionalities currently performed by human operators. The intended effect of automation is to free the perceptual and cognitive resources of the operator so that they can be reallocated to higher-level operations and decisions. However, operating UASs with a large degree of automation can lead in practice to intervals of time of high perceptual and cognitive demands on the operator, who becomes thus very prone to errors. In this context, it has been proposed that the in-flight alerts raised need to be understood quickly and without cognitive overloading. This paper introduces a technique that raises such alerts when the operator initiates execution of unsafe acts. A generic mission plan for an UAS is considered for illustrating how to prevent operator´s unsafe acts for a number of test scenarios. Some of the test scenarios are inspired by the documented UAS accidents that are available in the published literature.