An investigation of the role of cue utilisation in technical skill acquisition within the context of remotely piloted aircraft operations
Creators: name: Renshaw, Peter
Publisher: name: Macquarie University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 399999
subject: Other education not elsewhere classified

description: There is significant individual variability in the acquisition and application of complex technical skills, particularly in dynamic, time-pressured, uncertain, risk-laden, event-driven operational environments such as aviation. While the ability to initially acquire and further develop technical skills has been attributed to various factors including cognitive ability, personality, practice and motivation, there is substantive evidence to indicate that efficient technical skill acquisition is, in part, characterised by the capacity to identify, form, refine, and utilise a repertoire of predictive environmental feature-event/object associations known as cues. Cue utilisation has explained significant variance in human performance in complex sociotechnical domains such as conventional aviation, medicine, rail, and power control.
The proliferation of remotely piloted or unmanned aircraft systems in both military and civil aviation operations has generated a requirement for new operator and supporting skill sets that are not well understood. It has been argued that the role of humans in unmanned aircraft systems operations is qualitatively distinct from conventional aviation and that the applicability of human factors findings from conventional aviation may be limited. Given the diversity of unmanned systems and their reported vehicle, operating environment, and task-specific human factors problems, there is a need to develop non-task, non-platform dependent insights and measures of operator performance.
The primary aim of this research program was to investigate the role of cue utilisation in operating various types of simulated and actual remotely piloted aircraft with a view towards developing an understanding of how to best equip and train operators of unmanned or remotely supervised and operated systems across the continuum of scale, complexity, and automation. Paper 1 established that cross-task cue utilisation was sensitive to novice performance when learning to manually operate a simulated small rotary-wing visual line of sight remotely piloted aircraft. Paper 2 concluded that cross-task cue utilisation performance also distinguished performance when operating a simulated larger, highly automated, fixed-wing beyond visual line of sight unmanned aerial vehicle in a series of target detection and tracking tasks. Paper 3 ascertained that small drone operators with relatively higher levels of domain-specific cue utilisation were less likely to be involved in adverse safety events independent of drone flight experience. Paper 4 identified when a domain-specific measure of cue utilisation became sensitive to performance in learning to operate a small multi-rotor drone.
The results of the research explored the explanatory power of various psychological constructs during technical skill acquisition, and particularly the role of cue utilisation. It is often unclear if and/or at what rate remote pilots are developing their capacity for situation assessment until they are involved in an adverse safety event. A behaviour-based approach to the evaluation of situation assessment capability, which is dependent upon the extraction and application of cues in memory, has the potential to identify areas for improvement in remote pilot performance. The research has a bearing on unmanned systems operator selection, training, and the design of remote pilot stations.