Eye Glance Behaviors of Ground Control Station Operators in a Simulated Urban Air Mobility Environment

Research into concepts such as advanced air mobility (AAM) and urban air mobility (UAM) offers an opportunity for successfully and safely adding new classes of vehicles into the National Airspace System. However, a need exists for research into the human factors associated with these concepts. In this paper, we evaluate the gaze behaviors of three remote ground control station operators (GCSOs) conducting simulated UAM operations. The participants monitored and controlled an unmanned aircraft system (UAS) from pre-flight to landing using ground control station (GCS) software across nine scenarios within a remote UAS operations center at NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC). As this work was exploratory, descriptive statistics were calculated to provide some initial insight into GCSO gaze patterns associated with the GCS display. Scenarios that required the operator to directly interact with an airspace scheduling system off-screen resulted in fewer on-screen glances than scenarios that did not include direct interactions with the off-screen system. After investigating several areas of interest (AOIs) within the GCS display, participants primarily viewed three AOIs: the map, vehicle status, and operations checklist. The results yielded several GCS design and operational improvement recommendations to include: (a) adding altitude information to the vehicle icon, (b) adding additional traffic information, and (c) including additional GCS training, to reduce the need to scan an operations checklist, which would allow allocation of visual attention towards other AOIs.