Evaluating Drone Operator Motor Skills: A Comparison Between Simulated and Real Environments

This paper investigates the use of drone simulation software as a tool forevaluating drone operators’ motor skills in real scenarios. The experimentalscenario was a task based on the NIST Open Test Lanes concept, in whichoperators follow a designated route and take pictures of targets placed insidebuckets. An experiment was conducted using this scenario in two simulatedenvironments and a real setup, with two different drones. Ten licensed droneinstructors participated in the experiment. The results demonstrate that theperformance trends were consistent across both simulations and realenvironments, supporting the idea that simulators are reliable enough to be usedas a benchmark tool for predicting drone operators’ performance curves, makingthem useful for training planning.