25. Situation Awareness in the Control of Unmanned Ground Vehicles

SA has been described as “generating purposeful behavior.” that is, behavior that is directed toward a task goal (Smith & Hancock, 1995). It involves being aware of what is happening around you and understanding what occurring events mean with respect to your current and future goals. Endsley (1995) has formally defined SA as the “perception of elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning and the projection of their status in the near future” (Endsley, 1995, p. 36). SA has been hypothesized as being critical to operator task performance in complex and dynamic operations (Salas, Prince, Barker, & Shrestha, 1995), like tasking and controlling remotely operated systems. Operators in remote control of ground vehicles need to be aware of where the vehicle is, what the vehicle is doing, and how activities as part of the overall task lead to accomplishment of mission goals. They must also consider the health of the overall system and how the environment affects vehicle status and the ability to complete tasks. In studying robot control in simulated USAR operations, Drury, Scholtz, and Yanco (2003) observed that most of the problems encountered when navigating robots resulted from the human's lack of awareness of these elements.