Exploring Ecological Interface Design for Future ROV Capabilities in Maritime Command and Control

Abstract

Future maritime command teams will process more data, a trend driven by continued technological advances and new sensors. Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) are contributing to this, as their usage is steadily growing in civilian and military contexts. A key challenge is effective integration of growing volumes of data into the command team, ensuring optimal performance for completing the variety of missions and tasks that may be required. In particular, operator cognitive capacity should not be exceeded, as this may negatively impact global team performance. A review of ROV usage revealed that they are predominately deployed to understand and interact with their environment. Ecological Interface Design (EID) aims to make system constraints apparent and reduce operator workload. As the aims of EID are synergistic with ROV operation, it is hypothesised that operator workload may be reduced if interfaces are implemented that adhere to these design principles. In the current work EID is proposed as a design paradigm for ROV UIs, to facilitate optimal future performance.