(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2015-05)
Feigh, Karen M.; Johnson, Eric N.; Christmann, Hans Claus
With the achievement of autonomous flight for small unmanned aircraft, currently ongoing research is expanding the capabilities of systems utilizing such vehicles for various tasks. This allows shifting the research focus from the individual systems to task execution benefits resulting from interaction and collaboration of several aircraft. Given that some available high-fidelity simulations do not yet support multi-vehicle scenarios, a multi-vehicle framework has been introduced which allows several individual single-vehicle systems to be combined into a larger multi-vehicle scenario with little to no special requirements towards the single-vehicle systems. The created multi-vehicle system offers real-time software-in-the-loop simulations of vehicle teams across multiple hosts and enables a single operator to command and control a several unmanned aircraft beyond line-of-sight in geometrically correct two-dimensional cluttered environments through a multi-hop network of data relaying intermediaries. The related dissertation by Christmann presents the main aspects of the developed system: the underlying software framework and application programming interface, the utilized inter- and intrasystem communication architecture, the graphical user interface, and implemented algorithms and operator aid heuristics to support the management and placement of the vehicles.The effectiveness of the aid heuristics
is validated through a human subject study which showed that the provided operator support systems significantly improve the operators' performance in a simulated first responder scenario. This dataset contains the collected data of that human subject study.
(Georgia Institute of Technology., 2012-11)
Watts, Robert; Christmann, Hans Claus; Johnson, Eric N.; Feigh, Karen M.; Tsiotras, Panagiotis
Handling en route emergencies in modern transport aircraft through adequate teamwork between the pilot, the crew and the aircraft’s automation systems is an ongoing and active field of research. An automated path planning aid tool can assist pilots with the tasks of selecting a convenient landing site and developing a safe path to land at this site in the event of an onboard emergency. This paper highlights the pilot evaluation results of a human factors study as part of such a proposed automated planning aid. Focusing on the interactions between the pilot and the automated planning aid, the presented results suggest that a particular implementation of the pilot aid interface, which uses a simple dial to sort the most promising landing sites, was effective. This selectable sorting capability, motivated by the anticipated cognitive mode of the pilot crew, improved the quality of the selected site for the majority of the cases tested. Although the presented approach increased the average time required for the selection of an alternate landing site, it decreased the time to complete the task in the case of emergencies unfamiliar to the pilot crew.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2010-08)
Christmann, Hans Claus; Johnson, Eric N.
The presented work introduces a graph based approach to model urban (or otherwise
cluttered) environments for UAS utilization beyond line-of-sight as well as out of direct
R/F range of the operator's control station. Making the assumption that some a priori data
of the environment is available, the proposed method uses a classification of obstacles with
respect to their impact on UAV motion and R/F communication and generates continuously
updateable graphs usable to compute traverseable paths for UAVs while maintaining R/F
communication.
Using a simulated urban scenario this work shows that the proposed modeling method
allows to find reachable loiter or hover areas for UAVs in order to establish a multi-hop
R/F communication link between a primary UAV and its remote operator by utilizing an
overlay of motion (Voronoi based) and R/F (visibility based) specific mapping methods.