Optimising the balance between task automation and human manual control in simulated submarine track management

Automation can improve operator performance and reduce workload, but can also degrade operator situation awareness (SA) and the ability to regain manual control. This project explored strategies for automation design through low-level automation and limiting automation to periods of higher workload. We found the automation still provided limited benefit to workload and performance, but SA was still degraded. Performance on a concurrent non-automated task was also degraded. We concluded that the cost of automation might not be sufficiently mitigated with these strategies, and that more work is needed to ensure that operators perform optimally during automation support.