Eyes on Target: A Real-Time Eye Tracking Approach for Enhanced Performance and Interruption Management of Teams in UAV C2 Operations

Teams operating in complex systems, such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) command-and-control (C2) environments, face significant challenges in maintaining situation awareness (SA), managing workload, and ensuring effective coordination. Understanding how these teams interact and adapt under varying conditions is critical to optimizing performance and resilience. This dissertation explores the use of eye tracking technology as a real-time, unobtrusive tool to study and enhance team dynamics in these high-stakes settings.

The first phase of this research validates the use of scanpath similarity techniques for assessing team performance under different workload conditions. Both (1) Multidimensional Cross-Recurrence Quantification Analysis and (2) MultiMatch metrics have shown to be sensitive to workload changes and correlate with team performance, offering a promising approach to monitoring team states in real-time. However, the application of real-time metrics to understand and support team-level performance remains largely uncharted territory.

Building on these findings, this dissertation investigates the potential of gaze sharing as a novel intervention to improve team collaboration. By enabling team members to visualize their partner’s gaze in real-time, gaze sharing might address inefficiencies such as redundant overlapping visual attention during tasks. This research evaluates various gaze sharing visualization techniques, including fixation dots and trails, to determine their impact on workload, SA, scanning behavior, and task performance. Additionally, this work explores the integration of gaze sharing with communication strategies and its role in helping teams recover from interruptions. The findings reveal that gaze sharing using the fixation trail not only complements verbal and non-verbal communication, but also serves as a valuable tool for enhancing coordination during disruptions.

This dissertation bridges gaps in the theory of team collaboration within UAV C2 environments, contributing to both cognitive systems engineering and human-computer interaction. It advances theoretical understanding by identifying metrics and mechanisms that define effective team dynamics under varying conditions. Moreover, it provides actionable guidelines for integrating gaze sharing technologies into operational systems and lays the foundation for adaptive displays that monitor and support team performance in real-time. The contributions of this research extend beyond UAV operations, offering insights and methodologies that can be applied to other domains such as air traffic control and emergency response. By addressing the challenges of team coordination and workload management in complex systems, this work provides a critical step toward designing technologies that enhance both the safety and efficiency of collaborative operations in the modern world.