This paper investigates the effect of employing different display design principles for humanmachine interaction in helicopters. Two obstacle avoidance support displays are evaluated during low-altitude, forward flight. A baseline Head-Up Display is complemented either by a conventional advisory display, or a constraint-based display inspired by Ecological Interface Design. The latter design philosophy has only been sparsely applied in the helicopter domain. Twelve helicopter pilots participated in an experiment in a research flight simulator. We found no significant effects of the displays on objective performance measures. However, there was a trend of decreasing pilot workload and increasing situation awareness when employing the support displays, compared to the baseline display. The constraint-based display had the largest positive effect, and increased the resilience of the pilot-vehicle system towards unexpected events,
This paper includes an introduction to the concept of spreadsheet optimization and modeling as it specifically applies to combinatorial problems. One of the best known of the classic combinatorial problems is the “Traveling Salesman Problem” (TSP). The classic Traveling Salesman Problem has the objective of minimizing some value, usually distance, while defining a sequence of locations where each is visited once. An additional requirement is that the tour ends in the same location where the tour started. Variants of the classic Traveling Salesman Problem are developed including the Bottleneck TSP and the Variation Bottleneck TSP.
This paper aims to reveal the effect of different display design principles in the helicopter domain. Two different obstacle avoidance support displays are evaluated during low-altitude, forward helicopter flight: a baseline Head-Up Display (HUD) is complemented either by a conventional advisory display, or a constraint-based display inspired by Ecological Interface Design. The latter has only been sparsely applied in the helicopter domain. It is hypothesized that the advisory display reduces workload, increases situation awareness, and improves performance measures in nominal obstacle avoidance situations, while the constraint-based display increases the resilience of the pilot-vehicle system towards unexpected, off-nominal situations. Twelve helicopter pilots with varying flight experience participated in an experiment in the SIMONA Research Simulator at Delft University of Technology. Contrary to expectations, the experiment revealed no significant effects of the displays on any of the dependent measures. However, there was a trend of decreasing pilot workload and increasing situation awareness when employing any of the support displays, compared to the baseline HUD. Pilots preferred the advisory display in nominal and the constraint-based display in off-nominal situations, reproducing similar findings from research in the fixed-wing domain. The relatively short time-frame and monotony of the control-task, an already cue-rich baseline HUD condition, and similarity between the displays possibly prohibited revealing larger differences between conditions. Future research will analyze the obstacle avoidance trajectories of this experiment, possibly revealing changes in control strategy caused by the displays, even when the lumped performance measures are similar. A follow-up experiment will focus on a longer task time-frame, more variable situations, and a truly ecological display to investigate the effect of applying Ecological Interface Design and different automation systems in the helicopter domain.
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