Building User Proficiency in Piloting Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (sUAV)

Assessing proficiency in small unmanned aerial vehicles (sUAVs) pilots is complex and not well understood, but increasingly important to employ these vehicles in serious jobs such as wildland firefighting and infrastructure inspection. The limited prior work with UAVs has focused on user training using modalities like simulators and VR and no performance assessments with line-of-sight UAVs. This paper presents a training methodology for novice pilots of sUAVs. We presented two studies: the Baseline study (21 participants) and the Training study (16 participants). Our work is of interest to sUAV operators, regulators, and companies developing this technologies to produce a more capable workforce capable of consistent, safe operations. We successfully utilized the method developed in [1] to assess user proficiency in flying UAVs. We presented a UAV pilot training schedule for novice users (in the Training study), and were able to determine the minimum training time necessary to observe performance gains and mitigate damage. Results indicate that task completions noticeably improved and crashes minimized by day 10 of training, with a training plateau observed by day 15.