Modeling UASs for Role Fusion and Human Machine Interface Optimization

Currently, a single Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) requires several humans managing different aspects of the problem. Human roles often include vehicle operators, payload experts, and mission managers [1-3]. As a step toward reducing the number of humans required, it is desirable to reduce operator workload through effective distributed control, augmented autonomy, and intelligent user interfaces. Reliably doing this requires various roles in the system to be modeled. These roles naturally include the roles of the humans, but they also include roles delegated to autonomy and software decision-making algorithms, meaning the GUI and the unmanned aerial vehicle. This paper presents a conceptual model which models the roles of complex systems as a collection of actors, running in parallel. Results from applying this model to the UAS-enabled Wilderness Search and Rescue (WiSAR) domain indicate (a) it is possible to model the entire WiSAR system at varying degrees of abstraction (b) that building and evaluating the model provides insight into the best practices of WiSAR teams and (c) a way to model human machine interactions that works directly with the Java Pathfinder model checker to detect errors.