Human effectiveness issues in simulated uninhabited combat aerial vehicles

The advancement in technology has brought a new revolution in the military domain. The success of the two unmanned reconnaissance prototypes Predator and Hunter had paved the way to the development of more challenging remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), such as uninhabited combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs), used for locating, identifying, and destroying the enemy targets. As these semi-autonomous systems become more and more complex, the use of automation tools become inevitable. Although automation is introduced to reduce operator workload, increase in the automation features also increases the complexity of the system. The complexity of the system is increased by factors like situational awareness, trust, biases, workload, skill degradation as well as many other human factors issues. The purpose of this paper is to describe the research and development of a UCAV interfaces and simulation that can support human factors issues for controlling multiple UCAVs.