The Role of Affective Computing for Improving Situation Awareness in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Operations

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, are a robotic form of military aircraft that are remotely operated by humans. Due to lack of situation awareness, such technology has led to the deaths of civilians through the inaccurate targeting of missile or gun attacks. This chapter presents the case for how a patented invention can be used to reduce civilian casualties through attaching an affect recognition sensor to a UAV that uses a database of strategies, tactics and commands to better instruct fighter pilots on how to respond while in combat so as to avoid misinterpreting civilians as combatants. The chapter discusses how this system, called VoisJet, can reduce many of the difficulties that come about for UAV pilots, including reducing cognitive load and opportunity for missing data. The chapter concludes that using UAVs fitted with VoisJet could allow for the reduction of the size of standing armies so that defence budgets are not overstretched outside of peacetime.