Situational awareness is crucial in carrying out unmanned missions, which is why any opportunity to improve it deserves careful consideration. The majority of opportunities to enhance situational awareness belong to its first stage, which is the perception of the needed data. Research indicates that it is the most error-prone component of situational awareness – for instance, in aviation, 76 percent of SA errors in pilots are connected to not perceiving the necessary data (Endlsey & Jones, 2004). Such situations occur not merely because of the sensory limitations of human operators, but also due to technological limitations that compromise the constant flow of information to the operator. Thus, the perception of the elements of the environment is the most important aspect of situational awareness in an unmanned mission.
Various technological improvements are possible to increase situational awareness for operators in different domains. On the ground, an essential development would be an integrated command and control system allowing the cohesive use of multiple robotic assets of different sizes, designs, and capabilities (Hsieh et al., 2007). The same applies to aerial vehicles, especially when those are used for reconnaissance purposes together with the ground ones to complement each other (Hsieh et al., 2007). Due to the ever-present danger of collisions at sea, situational awareness tools help the operator to plan the efficient rouse while monitoring the status of the vehicle in this domain (Carrigan, 2009). Collisions are also a source of constant concern in space and. In this domain, the critical technological improvements would be the sensors capable of tracking both the orbit and the standard deviation of the measurement, which is crucial for collision prediction (Kalden & Bodemann, 2011). Thus, all four domains discussed have a potential for technological developments improving the operator’s situational awareness in unmanned missions.
References
- Carrigan, G. P. (2009). The design of an intelligent decision support tool for submarine commanders. Web.
- Endsley, M. R., & Jones, D. G. (2004). Designing for situation awareness An approach to user-centered design (2nd ed.). Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
- Hsieh, M. A., Cowley, A., Keller, J. F., Chaimowicz, L., Croholsky, B., Kumar, V., … MacKenzie, D. C. (2007). Adaptive teams of autonomous aerial and ground robots for situational awareness. Journal of Field Robotics, 24(11), 991-1014.
- Kalden, O., & Bodemann, C. (2011). Building space situational awareness capability. Proceedings of 5th International Conference on Recent Advances in Space Technologies – RAST2011, pp. 650-654. Istanbul, Turkey: IEEE.