Unmanned Air Vehicles: A New Age in Human Factors Evaluations

摘要

As the role of the aircraft pilot transitioned from a nearly total manual controller in early manned aircraft to one of supervisor' control and/or cooperative functioning in 'unmanned' aircraft, the human factors flight test approach and the associated test methodologies have necessarily changed. Piloting air vehicles evolved from using cockpit instruments and manual controls to fly the aircraft, to monitoring the cockpit instruments which fly the aircraft nearly automatically, to using ground station instruments to fly the aircraft remotely. while most, if not all, of the physical stressors of the cockpit are absent from the typical ground control station, many of the cockpit stimuli that provide invaluable aircraft health and status information are also absent. Increased levels of automation have induced new types of failures. These include failure to monitor, vigilance decrement, over reliance on standard values, automation-induced complacency, and increased latency in detecting problems. Consequently, these failures often lead to reduced operator performance due to information shortfall.