Data on the design and operation of drones by both individuals and teams

Guanglu Zhang; Nicolas F Soria Zurita; Gary Stump; Binyang Song; Jonathan Cagan; Christopher McComb

doi:10.1016/j.dib.2021.107008

Data on the design and operation of drones by both individuals and teams

Data Brief. 2021 Mar 27:36:107008. doi: 10.1016/j.dib.2021.107008. eCollection 2021 Jun.

Authors

Guanglu Zhang¹, Nicolas F Soria Zurita^{2

3}, Gary Stump⁴, Binyang Song², Jonathan Cagan¹, Christopher McComb²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, United States.
² School of Engineering Design, Technology, and Professional Programs, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, United States.
³ Colegio de Ciencias e Ingeniería, Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Diego de Robles y Vía Interoceánica, Quito, Pichincha, Ecuador.
⁴ Applied Research Laboratory, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, United States.

Abstract

Human subject experiments are performed to assess the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) agents on distributed human design teams and individual human designers. In the team experiment, participants in teams of six develop and operate a drone fleet to deliver parcels routed to multiple locations of a target market. Among the design teams in the experiment, half of the design teams are human-only teams with no available AI agent. The other half of the design teams, designated as hybrid teams, have drone design and operation AI agents to advise them. Halfway through the team experiment, team structure is changed unexpectedly, requiring participants to adapt to the change. In the individual experiment, participants develop drones based on given design specifications, either on their own or with the availability of a drone design AI agent to advise them. During these experiments, participants configure, test, and share their designs and communicate with their teammates through an online research platform. The platform collects a step-by-step log of the actions made by participants. This article contains data sets collected from 44 teams (264 participants) in the team experiment and 73 participants in the individual experiment. These data sets can be used for behavioral analysis, sequence-based analysis, and natural language processing.

Keywords: Artificial intelligence; Collaborative design; Design teams; Engineering design; Human–computer interaction; Team agility; Team structures.