Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Flight Control: False Alarms versus Misses

Thirty-two undergraduate pilots from the University of Illinois School of Aviation performed simulated military reconnaissance missions with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Pilots were required to: a) navigate the UAV through a series of mission legs, b) search for possible targets of opportunity, and c) monitor system health. They performed the missions under three types of auditory auto-alert aids (a 100% reliable system, a 67% reliable system with automation false alarms, and a 67% reliable system with automation misses), as well as a non-automated baseline condition. Results indicate that while reliable automation can benefit performance relative to baseline in the automated task, the unreliable automation aids reduced performance to that of baseline or worse. The automation false alarms and misses harmed performance in qualitatively different ways, with false alarm prone automation appearing to cause more damage than miss prone automation to both the automated task and the concurrent target search task.