# Improving Human Ground Control Performance in Unmanned Aerial Systems
###### Abstract  
The use of Unmanned Aerial Systems, commonly called drones, is growing enormously today. Applications that can benefit from the use of fleets of drones and a related human-machine interface are emerging to ensure better performance and reliability. In particular, a fleet of drones can become a valuable tool for monitoring a wide area and transmitting relevant information to the ground control station. We present a human-machine interface for a Ground Control Station used to remotely operate a fleet of drones, in a collaborative setting, by a team of multiple operators. In such a collaborative setting, a major interface design challenge has been to maximize the Team Situation Awareness, shifting the focus from the individual operator to the entire group decision-makers. We were especially interested in testing the hypothesis that shared displays may improve the team situation awareness and hence the overall performance. The experimental study we present shows that there is no difference in performance between shared and non-shared displays. However, in trials when unexpected events occurred, teams using shared displays-maintained good performance whereas in teams using non-shared displays performance reduced. In particular, in case of unexpected situations, operators are able to safely bring more drones home, maintaining a higher level of team situational awareness. unmanned aerial systems; user centered design; situation awareness +
Footnote †: journal:  
0000-0001-4607-2224]M.S.S. * Cost efficiency: a single vehicle to execute some tasks could be an expensive solution when comparing to several low-cost vehicles. Safety is a very important aspect and in recent years the number of accidents in which drones are involved is high [2]. Studies reveal that a major cause is ground operators' error, due to poorly designed user interfaces [3; 4]. Therefore, applications have emerged which require the use of a fleet of drones and a related human-machine interface to ensure better Situation Awareness (SA) by the operator. In fact, the lack of situation awareness (SA) is also often cited as a major cause of accidents [5] and therefore understanding SA and improving it with adequate system design is an important research target [6]. As a result, much work has been published on the subject. In a previous paper, we set out a vision on how to design a human machine interface for a GCS (Ground Control Station) of a fleet of drones performing a mission of persistent surveillance [7]. The design challenge for the fleet management interface was to capitalize all the available heterogeneous amount of data coming from drones and to set up a mechanism to allow efficient and safe interaction between the ground operator and the fleet, thanks to an enhanced SA. We focused on the design of a user interface which would allow a single remote ground operator to control a fleet of multiple drones. In the resulting prototype, scientific data coming from drones' payload are timely transformed into useful information on the interface in a way that supports an operator's SA, reducing the risk of being overwhelmed by information which may hinder his/her decision-making capability. The prototype can manage and show relevant data about the status of the drones such as battery life, altitude, coordinates, id, distance from the next target. All for the sake of safety and mission success. In the present paper we consider another realistic situation, which may occur when a fleet of drones is remotely operated from a ground control room in a collaborative setting, i.e., by a team of multiple operators. Control rooms for mission critical operations and monitoring networks have changed considerably over the years, relying today on smart technology able to better support human-machine allocation tasks and decision support activities as well as collaborative tasks.