Situation awareness during the live operation of remote vehicles

The project aims to investigate situation awareness (SA) in real-time with participants who are remotely controlling real vehicles (in contrast to the simulation approaches used by much of the current work). In addition, because remote operation is likely to become a skilled activity in which operators are trained and become highly practiced, there is a pressing need to understand the ways in which remote SA might change with increasing expertise. The project will also seek to address this issue. These questions have relevance for the psychological understanding of SA, in examining the processes whereby mental models of remote situations are developed and updated, and in clarifying the types of information that are both necessary for and desirable in supporting these processes. The research will also have clear real-world engineering applications, in informing the design of the interfaces for remote control operations that will be crucial to the successful introduction of autonomous vehicles to our roads.