Augmented Reality for Infrastructure Inspection with Semi-autonomous Aerial Systems: An Examination of User Performance, Workload, and System Trust

The use of augmented reality (AR) with drones in infrastructure inspection can increase human capabilities by helping workers access hard-to-reach areas and supplementing their field of view with useful information. Still unknown though is how these aids impact performance when they are imperfect. A total of 28 participants flew as an autonomous drone while completing a target detection task around a simulated bridge. Results indicated significant differences between cued and un-cued trials but not between the four cue types: none, bounding box, corner-bound box, and outline. Differences in trust amongst the four cues indicate that participants may trust some cue styles more than others.