Trust and human performance in automated formation flight station-keeping

This thesis primarily describes performance and decision heuristics of human operators intervention with an autonomous formation flight (AFF) system during monitoring of a station-keeping display. Due to mental and physical workloads, automation technologies have been applied to formation flight for precise station-keeping and resultant fuel reduction, shifting control authority from humans to machines. Accordingly, the human is not directly in the control loop, but just supervises whether or not the automation works as intended. One critical problem in AFF supervisory control is that the human pilot needs to intervene with AFF system when the automated systems malfunction or their functions degrade. Thus while monitoring a station-keeping display, operators should minimize incorrect decisions for safety and cost reduction. To examine design issues in such a display, a simulation was constructed that simulated two different control systems as well as the impact of different angles of bank. 20 subjects participated in the monitoring task simulation of the station-keeping display. During the experiments, subjects were asked to intervene with AFF system when the AFF system failed to keep the trailing aircraft in the vortex area. Subjects made the most incorrect decisions when the AFF system was operated with the oscillating controller and high angle of bank.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Jang, Jinho, S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Mary (Missy) L. Cummings.

• Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/34139

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/34139