Aircraft pilot situational awareness interface for airborne operation of network controlled Unmanned Systems (US).

Abstract

This thesis research is focused on Network Centric Operations with Unmanned Systems (US). It specifically focuses on the currently underdeveloped area of aircraft pilot decision support for operating USs, including Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV) and Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV), over the network from the board of an aircraft. Building on Landreth and Glass's thesis on controlling UAV over the network, including from another manned aircraft, this thesis aims to ease implementation and usage of the, SA interface. The SA interface enables the operator to be aware of what is going on around the Unmanned System while it is being operated from a remote location, and to react in the best possible way within a reasonable amount of time. The Rascal UAV interface was reviewed, SA-related problems were identified, and solutions to those problems were proposed. After our studies we proposed eight possible solutions to implement, and one of them is implemented and used. However, due to some problems, we could not test all our solutions.