Assessing Human Factors for Drone Operations in a Simulation Environment

Small drones are use more and more by civilian and military users for all kinds of applications. However, this technology also bears a risk: novice or ill-trained users often cause incidents with drones, leading to dangerous situations. While the drone industry is investing massively in technological responses to this threat, it has been shown that most of the drone incidents can be attributed to a human error. For this reason, it is important to know what are the exact human factors that play an important role during operations with small drones. This paper responds to this need by the introduction of a novel concept to provide a qualitative and quantitative assessment of the performance of the drone operator. We thereby focus specifically on the use case of military operators of small drones. The methodology is based on two key constituents: a series of standardized test methods & scenarios and a highly realistic simulation environment.