Investigating safety of autonomous drones
Enabling safer and more efficient drone deliveries
Please Note: The finer details of this work (including the name of the client) have been withheld due to an NDA agreement.
Human-in-the-loop simulations
Usability Testing
Benchmarking
Literature Review
The Methods
Increased the efficiency of drone operations by 2000%
Results from safety tests were presented to the EASA (European Union Aviation Safety Agency) and the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration)
My research informed the design of a new drone management UI, enabling human-in-the-loop control of autonomous drones
The Impact
Lead Human Factors UX Researcher
My Role
Project Director
Project Manager
Interaction Designer
Engineering Lead (Client)
Systems Safety Engineer (Client)
Flight Test Engineer (Client)
Collaborators
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Our client was an e-commerce giant looking to build up their drone delivery operations. They faced stiff competition from their competitors who were starting to scale their own operations.
The major hurdle was for them to increase the efficiency of their operators so that one drone operator could safely control many drones simultaneously.
The Problem
Research objectives and my role
Conduct a literature review to understand aviation regulations and human factors research concerning drone safety
Develop a safety-testing framework to test future drone operations
Draft a white paper for aviation regulatory bodies to get approvals for future operations
Identify safety benchmarks based on current operations to compare future ones
Identify best display design practices based on human factors research to create a new UI for remote drone control
Methods
We used multiple methods for this research including:
Literature review: This method helped identify relevant safety testing metrics (and corresponding measures) to include in our testing framework. We also identified relevant display design principles to inform designs of the future UI.
Human-in-the-loop (HITL) simulations + Usability Testing: Data collection during real-world operations is usually not possible in technical and safety-critical operations. HITL simulations allow us to collect generalizable data while dealing with practical constraints.
We developed high-fidelity prototypes and worked with the flight test engineer to develop real-world scenarios for safety testing.
I developed an experimental design to evaluate the cause-effect relationships between the type of UI, the number of drones, and the difficulty of scenarios. I used SPSS software to conduct multiple ANOVAs, (a family of statistical tests designed to assess if differences observed in research have a reasonable probability of being observed in the real world).
We found that the major safety issue with the UI was due to operators not noticing failure alerts in time and a clustered UI when the number of drones displayed increased. Additionally, results from statistical analysis pointed to positive outcomes for scaling drone operations with higher levels of automation.
Key Takeaway
The white paper I drafted was presented to the EASA (European Union Aviation Safety Agency) and the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration).
My research informed the design of the new UI, which would increase the efficiency of drone operations by >2000%
Impact
Drafted a set of design principles for the client’s UX designers to use in future design prototypes to address safety concerns.
Recognition
“Sky-High-Fives to the team for their exceptional, groundbreaking work to help our client attain FAA approval to allow them to manage multiple delivery drones with one operator. Led by Ani, they developed a white paper with supporting data generated by two user research rounds that demonstrated the feasibility of this objective. This was followed by an Expert Review, Workshop, and UI design proposal + design principles for their next-gen drone tracking system. This wasn’t your everyday research project, as the UX implications were profound- impacting not only efficiency but public safety as well. THANK YOU for your tremendous work!”