Design and Evaluation of a Constraint-Based Head-Up Display for Helicopter Obstacle Avoidance

Abstract

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,

Influencing factors of novice pilot SA based on DEMATEL-AISM method: From pilots’ view

“…In fact, as an interactive medium, the cockpit interface provides organized information for pilots, hence, the merit of interface design guides the eye movement and information perception of pilot, influencing pilot SA in consequence [ [75] , [76] , [77] ]. Studies suggest several feasible approaches to improve the merit of interface design, such as optimizing visual coding, developing enhanced visual system, and exploiting synthetic visual system [ [78] , [79] , [80] ]. Moreover, occupational age and experience, as well as authority gradient, are also crucial for novice pilot SA.…”

Visual augmentation of deck-landing-ability improves helicopter ship landing decisions

“…The Ecological Interface Design framework (EID) might provide frugal solutions for designing visual Augmentations for helicopter pilots. EID has proved to be a means of improving levels of performance and safety in a large variety of activities (such as robot teleoperation 13 ; missile and naval missile control 14 , 15 ; military mission planning 16 , 17 ), as well as enhancing aircraft pilots’ awareness of terrain 18 , 19 , their control of flight path and speed 20 , 21 , their monitoring of aircraft separation and conflict resolution 22 , helicopters’ ship deck landing 23 , helicopters’ obstacle avoidance 24 , and other tasks (for a review, see 25 ).…”

Human-automation interaction for helicopter flight: Comparing two decision-support systems for navigation tasks

“…Visualised constraints can be physical (e.g., avoiding flight into terrain or bad weather) or procedural (e.g., staying above a predetermined safe altitude) [5]. EID principles have been only sparsely applied in the helicopter domain, for example for shipboard landing [6] and obstacle avoidance [7].…”