The paper describes work in attaining high levels of autonomy in vehicles teamed with the human operator. It will define autonomy in the context of UAVs and the meaning of "level of autonomy". The paper will argue that the achievement of high levels of autonomy is not merely a function of increasing machine intelligence but also of maintaining the human operator's engagement with the decision making process and retaining human authority. It will be argued that the human must be placed at the centre of the design process and consequently the human machine interface and the system architecture become critical to achieving high levels of autonomy. The paper describes SE and flight trials used in the development process and focuses on recent flight trials where the pilot of a Tornado was able to control 4 UCAVs carrying out a search and destroy mission where one platform was a Surrogate UAV (BAC1-11) laboratory aircraft simulating 3 synthetic UCAVs. To reduce operator workload, high levels of autonomy were delivered using novel HMI and machine intelligence technologies resulting in pilot feedback comparing workload to that of traditional sensors.
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