Designing and Enhancing Declutter Algorithms for UAV Systems (DAEDALUS)

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have demonstrated their extraordinary potential to support combat missions, resulting in their continually expanding role in high-risk tactical missions. The move toward multiple, increasingly autonomous UAVs simultaneously supervised by a single operator, combined with the paradigms of Network-Centric Warfare, creates an abundance of information that must be communicated to an operator via displays with limited information bandwidth. The disparity between the available information and current display capabilities results in cluttered displays that limit the operator's ability to perceive and understand the presented information, hindering their situational awareness and decision-making. To address this problem, we propose to design and demonstrate a toolkit for Designing And Enhancing Declutter ALgorithms for UAV Systems (DAEDALUS). Three core components characterize our approach. First, we will perform a requirements analysis on a specific scenario to identify situations where cluttered displays obscure important information and understand how qualifiers of information (meta-information such as uncertainty, recency) are used by operators to reason about and selectively attend to information. Second, we will design and demonstrate a toolkit for rapidly prototyping declutter algorithms and associated display methods that exploit meta-information. Third, we will conduct initial evaluations to systematically determine the effectiveness of the enhanced declutter techniques.