Calibrating Pilot Awareness in Autonomous Combat Aircraft

Incorporating advanced autonomous systems, such as intelligent tactical autopilots, onboard manned military fighter aircraft will allow pilots to focus on managing additional air combat tasks while their autonomous counterparts maneuver the aircraft. One key challenge of maximizing the mission’s overall success is that the pilots must optimally divide their attention between monitoring the autonomy, to ensure safety, and other necessary tasks. The research conducted here explores methods for calibrating attention and affecting human trust in an autonomy-aided fighter cockpit while minimizing pilot workload. An experiment was performed to measure pilot eye-gaze, head position, workload, task performance, and trust while flying with autonomous agents that were simulated to be in control of the aircraft during live aerial combat maneuvers. During the combat maneuvers, the participants completed non-flying tasks directly related to the combat scenario, with and without a novel attention calibration system in the loop. With the addition of an attention calibration system in the loop, overall pilot task performance and trust increased, and cognitive workload decreased.