Investigating Supervisory-level Activity Awareness Displays for Command and Control Operations

This paper describes a preliminary study that investigates new information visualization and data fusion concepts to help provide situation and activity awareness to mission commanders overseeing teams of unmanned vehicle operations engaged in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions. These display concepts are based on the design concept of activity awareness – a design approach focused on improving planning and coordination in teamwork through intelligent sharing of group activity information. In order to begin evaluating how well these display concepts facilitate supervisory-level decision making, we conducted an exploratory laboratory user experiment. In the study, participants assumed the role of a mission commander overseeing a team of three unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operators (played by members of the experiment team) who are each controlling three (simulated) UAVs. This paper presents results from this experiment and subsequent design revisions that were made in response to these study findings.