Design and evaluation of operator support functions for the CSHIELD platform

An autonomous, adaptive navigation system, tightly coupled with the overall mission management system, can provide unmanned systems with the capability to autonomously change and execute mission plans. Legislative issues, the difficulty to meet the extremely high reliability requirements of an autonomous collision avoidance function and the associated development and certification challenges can all be reasons to limit the authority of such an adaptive system by involving/requiring a human operator at the decision making level. The role of the human operator is to make decisions during situations in which significant changes in the navigation plan are needed to accomplish the mission. Such a concept of operation imposes specific challenges that must be addressed during the design of the systems that support the operator with this supervisory task. The paper starts with addressing the commonality in the associated challenges between nautical and aeronautical platforms and between manned and unmanned systems. It will be illustrated how during the past 60 years, research in both the nautical and the aeronautical domain has addressed aspects of these challenges and how developments in the area of sensors, processors and display capabilities increased the possibilities to both increase system autonomy and keep the human operator involved with the required authority. Following this background, it will be discussed how components of a system designed to support a UAS pilot with the separation assurance task have been re-used in the realization of a prototype operator support system for an unmanned vessel, the CSHIELD platform. Results of an initial simulation-based evaluation are also presented.