Automation reliability in unmanned aerial vehicle flight control

Twenty-four students flew a simulated unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) through ten mission legs while searching for targets of opportunity and monitoring system parameters. Participants were assisted by automation which provided auditory alerts in response to system failures (SF). The auto-alerts were either 80% reliable or 60% reliable; the latter condition resulted in either a 3:1 ratio of false alarms to misses, or vice versa. Results indicated that the 80% reliable automation exceeded baseline (no automation) performance in the target search task. The two 60% reliable conditions provided no benefits to performance; both false alarms and misses hurt performance in the automated task and concurrent tasks, but did so qualitatively differently. Implications for this study suggest that automated aids must be fairly reliable to provide global benefits, and data regarding the relative costs of misses versus false alarms on performance were equivocal.