VIDEO: Optimizing Human-System Interaction — Wisk’s Workload Management for Multi-Vehicle Supervision

Wisk has released anoth­er video which explores some of the tech­nol­o­gy the com­pa­ny is work­ing on and how it will help pio­neer the future of air trav­el with its autonomous Gen 6 eVTOL air­craft.

Released today (Mon­day), the blog below shares more details about how it is opti­mis­ing human-sys­tem inter­ac­tion.

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At Wisk, we’re pio­neer­ing the future of air trav­el with our autonomous Gen 6 air­craft, over­seen by human Mul­ti-Vehi­cle Super­vi­sors (MVSors) from a ground-based oper­a­tions cen­ter.

This rev­o­lu­tion­ary “one-to-many” flight super­vi­sion con­cept presents unique chal­lenges, par­tic­u­lar­ly in man­ag­ing oper­a­tor work­load. Our ded­i­cat­ed Human Fac­tors team is at the fore­front, metic­u­lous­ly design­ing and eval­u­at­ing a safe and reli­able sys­tem that ensures our MVSors can effi­cient­ly man­age mul­ti­ple autonomous air­craft simul­ta­ne­ous­ly.

Our rig­or­ous test­ing process begins long before human inter­ac­tion. We uti­lize advanced soft­ware to mod­el task sequences and pre­dict poten­tial work­loads, allow­ing us to iden­ti­fy and address issues ear­ly in the design phase.

This iter­a­tive approach saves time and resources. Once we have a refined the­o­ret­i­cal mod­el, we move to our sim­u­la­tor. Here, par­tic­i­pants active­ly man­age mul­ti­ple vir­tu­al air­craft, enabling us to observe and mea­sure cog­ni­tive work­load, sit­u­a­tion­al aware­ness, and task per­for­mance in real­is­tic nom­i­nal and off-nom­i­nal sce­nar­ios.

We employ a com­bi­na­tion of objec­tive met­rics, such as task com­ple­tion rates, error fre­quen­cy, and reac­tion times, along­side sub­jec­tive mea­sures like NASA-TLX ques­tion­naires to gauge per­ceived work­load, stress, and frus­tra­tion. Addi­tion­al­ly, phys­i­o­log­i­cal mark­ers like heart rate vari­abil­i­ty and eye-track­ing data pro­vide deep­er insights into the oper­a­tor’s expe­ri­ence.

Under­stand­ing and opti­miz­ing MVSor work­load is para­mount to safe­ty and effi­cien­cy. Our research trans­lates direct­ly into action­able design require­ments for improv­ing human-sys­tem inter­ac­tion.

This includes opti­miz­ing user inter­faces by pri­or­i­tiz­ing alerts and lever­ag­ing automa­tion for rou­tine tasks, ensur­ing the sys­tem works seam­less­ly with the oper­a­tor. We strive for a bal­ance between effi­cien­cy and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, with­out com­pro­mis­ing oper­a­tor well-being or pas­sen­ger safe­ty.

Fur­ther­more, our work extends to inte­grat­ing these find­ings with exist­ing Air Traf­fic Con­trol (ATC) oper­a­tions and nation­al air­space inter­ac­tions, aim­ing to be a depend­able part­ner in build­ing a safer, more effi­cient future for air trav­el.