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thumbnail of Drone swarms unlocking the potential of human swarm teams

Author
Siddharth Shyamsundar
Abstract
Drone swarms represent a paradigm shift in human autonomy teaming while also bringing unprecedented advantages to civilian and military applications. While enabled by high levels of autonomy, human operators will continue to play a vital role, interacting with the swarm as a single entity, overseeing the mission and making key decisions. This paper discusses the human factors considerations associated with human swarm teams and introduces a bespoke human swarm teaming philosophy for a future drone swarming concept. Integrating autonomy and human information processing models, this concept of control allows the dynamic sharing of tasks between the autonomous swarm and the human operator while optimising key human factors considerations like situational awareness, workload, attention and fatigue. The first principles and designs of a novel human machine interface developed to implement this human swarm teaming philosophy while accounting for the real-world challenges associated with imperfect data transmission and beyond line-of-sight communications are also presented and discussed.