User profile analysis for UAV operators in a simulation environment

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles have been a growing field of study over the last few years. The use of unmanned systems require a strong human supervision of one or many human operators, responsible for monitoring the mission status and avoiding possible incidents that might alter the execution and success of the operation. The accelerated evolution of these systems is generating a high demand of qualified operators, which requires to redesign the training process to deal with it. This work aims to present an evaluation methodology for inexperienced users. A multi- UAV simulation environment is used to carry out an experiment focused on the extraction of performance profiles, which can be used to evaluate the behavior and learning process of the users. A set of performance metrics is designed to define the profile of a user, and those profiles are discriminated using clustering algorithms. The results are analyzed to extract behavioral patterns that distinguish the users in the experiment, allowing the identification and selection of potential expert operators.