Commodore Garry Beauvoir of Naval Defence Consulting Identifies the issues around Situation Awareness and Out-of-Loop Syndrome with Autonomous /Drone Ships

Commodore Garry Beauvoir’s research on Situation Awareness (SA) in regard to Autonomous/Drone Shipping highlights it is being aware of what is happening around the operator and understanding what that information means now and in the near future. SA is a goal-directed concept, meaning that the attentional resources are used to capture the elements that are relevant for the goals of tasks. It would be very critical for the operators to stay on the right track towards their goals when they are constantly monitoring automated process. A key challenge is the out-of- the-loop syndrome.

While automation can reduce the cognitive workload in normal routine tasks, it can undermine SA by making the operators mistakenly believe the system in control is in one status/mode when it is actually not. This could be very dangerous if the operator needs to verify or diagnose the real problem when there are unanticipated incidents/signals coming from the system a.k.a. false positives.

The maintenance and development of SA is so important for the interaction of human agents and automation system that it has two very significant indications in the system design:
1) Information should be clearly provided to the operators as salient feedback via usable interfaces.
2) The system that require extensive human monitoring should counter the human “vigilance-decrementing” affect and involve operators in an active manner.

Future autonomous/drone ship systems will need to pay significant attention to the development of autonomy approaches that must enable maintaining required levels of situation awareness and truly support users for decision making. The system design is a critical factor to influence the operator’s understanding and dynamically constructing their mental model of the complex world.

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Naval Defence Consulting
Minderbroedersberg
Maastricht Netherlands

This release was published on openPR.