Tactical Conflict Avoidance of Manned Traffic - Display Concepts for UAV Pilots

The number of collisions between manned and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has risen due to the increased use of UAVs. Pilots of manned aircraft can visually detect the usually much smaller UAVs only very late or not at all, which is why UAVs are required to avoid manned aircraft in lower airspace by most regulations. For the task of collision avoidance, the UAV pilot needs appropriate traffic awareness. While operating UAVs within the visual line of sight (VLOS), the UAV pilot can monitor the surrounding traffic himself, but operation beyond the visual line of sight (BVLOS) requires an additional airspace observer or a supporting detect-and-avoid system. In this work, a traffic display concept supporting UAV pilots is derived and proposed using the human-centered design process. Commonly used collision avoidance displays of manned and unmanned aviation are reviewed and the user context for the proposed traffic display is introduced. An online survey is conducted to gather user preferences for several 2D graphical elements of the traffic display. 25 experienced UAV pilots participated in the survey. The data is analyzed using Gwet’s AC1 agreement coefficient. Overall, fair agreement can be observed with individual coefficients for different 2D graphical elements ranging from poor to almost perfect agreement. With a developed heuristic, preferred 2D graphical elements are extracted and combinations reviewed to derive a complete traffic display design. The proposed traffic display design, based on user preferences, will be implemented for further evaluation in human-in-the-loop experiments.