Methodologies for Assessing Situation Awareness of Unmanned System Operators

Abstract

Situation awareness (SA) in human robot interaction is an important issue – because it is so essential to reconnaissance tasks and because remote viewing of the environment makes it so difficult. Two query-based techniques for assessing SA are presented and contrasted. Participants provided information regarding detection and identification of potential threats during a scenario. After the scenario, operators reconstructed where they navigated, the targets they encountered, and the identification of target type (e.g., friendly, neutral, or enemy). The first SA coding method (perception-based) compared post-experiment recollections of targets (location and type) to information the subject provided during the scenario, using the operator’s perceptions during the scenario as a baseline. The second SA coding method (reality-based) compared the same postexperiment recollections to actual target locations and type, using objective reality as a baseline. The SA reality metric was significantly correlated with task performance, but the SA perception metric was not correlated with objective performance. The SA reality errors were consistently greater than the SA perception errors, possibly because the SA reality measure includes both recall and task accuracy errors. The discussion explores why and when it would be beneficial to employ each method.