Human operator and unmanned aerial vehicles control in the smart city

Today due to widespread occurrence of unmanned aerial vehicles, possible ways of their use in the smart city, for example, in delivery services or in wireless communication provision are being discussed. Such systems will be controlled and maintained by human operators working at control stations. The article investigates ergonomic problems that may arise in their work. Emphasis is placed on the following problems: lack of sensory information, difficulties of working with complex automatization, irregular working-hours of human operators and cognitive changes caused by all these difficulties. The article describes stress factors of human operators' work at control stations as well as related cognitive impairments that are caused by an event that needs immediate human intervention. The paper explores the influence of situational awareness level on success of solving tasks connected with human factor and current development state of estimation methods of situational awareness among unmanned aerial vehicles operators. The author suggests directions for development of human-machine interfaces that will help to reduce human factor mistakes in such systems. From various problems connected with developing such interfaces the paper considers in detail the problem of visualization of a large group of robots (swarm of robots) and the problem of getting feedback from single robots. When searching a solution for these problems it is necessary to consider human attention limitation and the problem of human trust in technical equipment. Special attention is paid to the possibility of introducing predictive displays that will reduce the load on human operators and systems that will filter and integrate information coming from unmanned aerial vehicles.