Multimodal Displays for Enhancing Performance in a Supervisory Monitoring Task

This study investigated the efficacy of a multimodal display ground control station (GCS) for the control of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to convey system faults and environmental hazards. The participant’s task was to fly a short UAV mission, detect critical events, and land safely in possibly strong turbulence and wind shear. While monitoring for critical events, the participant also carried out a secondary task. The GCS simulator was equipped with an auditory display that provided information on engine revolutions per minute (RPM), and a tactile display that provided information on attitude upset. Multiple performance measures were used to determine whether the auditory display and tactile display improved monitoring performance relative to a visual-only GCS display. Results showed that the auditory display resulted in significantly faster reaction times to detect critical events in engine RPM. However, the tactile display did not add any benefit to warn participants of attitude upset. The results should help further the understanding of multimodal display effectiveness to enhance situation awareness for improving operator efficiency on monitoring tasks in complex systems.

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