Combinatorial Effects of Unmanned Vehicles on Operator’s Mental Workload and Performance for Searching

Abstract: With the advancement of artificial intelligence technology, unmanned vehicle (UV) systems, including unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and unmanned ground vehicle (UGV), have been appearing in many scenarios with wide-ranging applications. It is a crucial factor for enhancing human-computer collaboration efficiency to analyze the impact of unmanned vehicle system combinations on operators. The research in this paper presents the effects of different combinations of UAVs and UGVs (1UAV + 1UGV, 1UAV + 2UGVs, 2UAVs + 1UGV, 2UAVs + 2UGVs) on searching performance and operator’s mental workload for accomplishing search tasks. Completion times for tasks and subjective data with operators (N=16) were collected by using Psychopy and questionnaires, respectively. The results in this research indicate that binary growth of controllable unmanned vehicles doesn’t improve the UV utilization rate, but costing longer completion time and increasing operator’s mental workload. Since an excessive number of unmanned vehicles could have a negative impact on task performance, the insights in the paper are helpful for the design of unmanned vehicle systems and the research of human-computer collaboration.

Keywords: Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, Unmanned Ground Vehicle, Mental workload, Performance

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1005011

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