'Too Many Screens': Why Drones Are So Hard To Fly - And So Easy To Crash

LAS VEGAS: The US military depends on drones. But amidst the justifiable excitement over the rise of the robots, it's easy to overlook that today's unmanned systems are not truly autonomous but rather require a lot of human guidance by remote control -- and bad design often makes the human's job needlessly awkward, to the point of causing crashes. Fixing that is the next big challenge for the unmanned industry.

"Too many screens with too much information, folks" -- that's the bottom line, said Col. John Dougherty, a Predator operations commander with the North Dakota National Guard, speaking at a workshop on the first day of 2012 conference of the Association for Unmanned Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) here in Vegas. "I am tired of all these black panels all over the place," Dougherty went on, urging designers to "de-clutter for sanity." But instead, he lamented, "they keep strapping the stuff on," adding more and more sub-systems each with its own unique and user-unfriendly display.




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