User Experience Design for Human-Machine Teaming in Commanding a Distributed Constellation of Unmanned Assets in Search and Rescue

Search and rescue missions are time-sensitive, with their duration impacting survivability. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly shortening response time, accelerating area coverage, and informing resource allocation. However, interactions of UAVs and human operators pose challenges, for example, related to understandability and trust in automation. This work seeks to facilitate human-machine teaming in designing an on-the-loop user experience with a constellation of UAVs as they narrow search areas by locating and triangulating mobile phone signals using dynamic co-fields autonomy. First, an abstraction-decomposition hierarchy is built to represent underlying values and requirements of the domain. Second, user interfaces are designed to reduce UAV and phone positional uncertainty over time, monitor power, communications, and other information per asset, and empower the operator to influence drone behavior. Their design includes spatiotemporal representations of search areas, UAV positions, communications signals, as well as notifications. Finally, user evaluation was conducted with domain and usability experts.