The Next Generation of Human-Drone Partnerships: Co-Designing an Emergency Response System
This addresses the problem of balancing autonomy and safety in emergency response drones for stakeholders, but it is incremental as it builds on existing SA concepts.
The paper tackled the design of a human-drone emergency response system by developing situational awareness (SA) cards to engage domain experts, resulting in a potentially reusable solution for multi-stakeholder, multi-UAV applications.
The use of semi-autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) to support emergency response scenarios, such as fire surveillance and search and rescue, offers the potential for huge societal benefits. However, designing an effective solution in this complex domain represents a "wicked design" problem, requiring a careful balance between trade-offs associated with drone autonomy versus human control, mission functionality versus safety, and the diverse needs of different stakeholders. This paper focuses on designing for situational awareness (SA) using a scenario-driven, participatory design process. We developed SA cards describing six common design-problems, known as SA demons, and three new demons of importance to our domain. We then used these SA cards to equip domain experts with SA knowledge so that they could more fully engage in the design process. We designed a potentially reusable solution for achieving SA in multi-stakeholder, multi-UAV, emergency response applications.