The Effects of System Reliability and Task Uncertainty on Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Operator Performance Under High Time Pressure

<div class="line" id="line-7"> This study examined the effects of system reliability and task uncertainty on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operator performance for the patrol and target recognition tasks. The primary task was image processing that entailed differentiating between targets and distracters, making necessary changes to the identifications provided by the automation, and processing images accurately within a 5&hyphen;s window. There were also 3 secondary tasks that are typical of UAV operations to which the participants had to respond as quickly as possible. Operator performance was measured as target image processing accuracy and image processing time as in the primary task and three secondary tasks. A 2 &times; 2 within&hyphen;subject design was used to assess the effects of reliability and target uncertainty. Both factors were found to be significant for primary task image processing time. In contrast, accuracy was not found to be significantly affected by either one of the independent variables.</div>