Situation Awareness by Design: Consensus-Based Interface Design for Maritime Teleoperation

Abstract

Current concepts in the ongoing development of Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) have introduced the need of humans-in-the-loop as remote operators, supervisors, or fallbacks when autonomy reaches its limits, and is thus a core requirement in the MASS Code. This make the human interaction with the Graphical User Interface (GUI) at the Remote Operation Center (ROC) a primary safety barrier. In practise, however, GUI design is often relegated to lower-tier design priorities, potentially introducing risks. We investigate whether an “optimal” interface exists which results in increased performance in remote steering for the intended user, thereby mitigating risks. To test the hypothesis, we compared an existing baseline GUI to an aggregate consensus determined by participants’ customized GUIs in a systematic field trial. A repeated measures design was used (N = 8 experienced seafarers) whereby each trial consisted of a remote transit and maneuvering task of a 5-meter-long research vessel teleoperated in a harbour basin using both baseline and custom GUIs. Customization was enabled with a drag-and-drop interface of 11 video configurations and 13 widgets built into an existing teleoperator station prototype [1]. Dependent variables were (i) GUI layout construction (i.e., location of on-screen video and widgets), (ii) cognitive workload (NASA-TLX), and (iii) condition preference. Our findings show that: (1) there was significant individual variation within customized GUI construction despite full task completion and equal workload compared to baseline; (2) there was a significant difference across GUI conditions (baseline versus custom) for both transit and maneuvering modes; and that (3) a majority of the seafarers (five out of eight) preferred their custom GUI to the baseline. We also present the results of the commonly preferred GUI design from the aggregate of users’ layouts, and discuss the implications of enabling pre-set custom builds to accommodate individual needs. The results are expected to inform GUI design guidelines for maritime teleoperation and future MASS control centers.