Mixed reality for unmanned aerial vehicle operations in near Earth environments

Future applications will bring unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to near Earth environments such as urban areas, causing a change in the way UAVs are currently operated. Of concern is that UAV accidents still occur at a much higher rate than the accident rate for commercial airliners. A number of these accidents can be attributed to a UAV pilot's low situation awareness (SA) due to the limitations of UAV operating interfaces. The main limitation is the physical separation between the vehicle and the pilot. This eliminates any motion and exteroceptive sensory feedback to the pilot. These limitation on top of a small field of view from the onboard camera results in low SA, making near Earth operations difficult and dangerous. Autonomy has been proposed as a solution for near Earth tasks but state of the art artificial intelligence still requires very structured and well defined goals to allow safe autonomous operations. Therefore, there is a need to better train pilots to operate UAVs in near Earth environments and to augment their performance for increased safety and minimization of accidents.