Design and testing of an unlimited field-of-regard synthetic vision head-worn display for commercial aircraft surface operations

Abstract

Experiments and flight tests have shown that a Head-Up Display (HUD) and a head-down, electronic moving map (EMM) can be enhanced with Synthetic Vision for airport surface operations. While great success in ground operations was demonstrated with a HUD, the research noted that two major HUD limitations during ground operations were their monochrome form and limited, fixed field of regard. A potential solution to these limitations found with HUDs may be emerging Head Worn Displays (HWDs). HWDs are small, lightweight full color display devices that may be worn without significant encumbrance to the user. By coupling the HWD with a head tracker, unlimited field-of-regard may be realized for commercial aviation applications. In the proposed paper, the results of two ground simulation experiments conducted at NASA Langley are summarized. The experiments evaluated the efficacy of head-worn display applications of Synthetic Vision and Enhanced Vision technology to enhance transport aircraft surface operations. The two studies tested a combined six display concepts: (1) paper charts with existing cockpit displays, (2) baseline consisting of existing cockpit displays including a Class III electronic flight bag display of the airport surface; (3) an advanced baseline that also included displayed traffic and routing information, (4) a modified version of a HUD and EMM display demonstrated in previous research; (5) an unlimited field-of-regard, full color, head-tracked HWD with a conformal 3-D synthetic vision surface view; and (6) a fully integrated HWD concept. The fully integrated HWD concept is a head-tracked, color, unlimited field-of-regard concept that provides a 3-D conformal synthetic view of the airport surface integrated with advanced taxi route clearance, taxi precision guidance, and data-link capability. The results of the experiments showed that the fully integrated HWD provided greater path performance compared to using paper charts alone. Further, when comparing the HWD with the HUD concept, there were no differences in path performance. In addition, the HWD and HUD concepts were rated via paired-comparisons the same in terms of situational awareness and workload. However, there were over twice as many taxi incursion events with the HUD than the HWD.

Synthetic Vision Enhanced Surface Operations With Head-Worn Display for Commercial Aircraft

“…This test was the second of two studies evaluating the efficacy of head-worn displays for surface operations (Arthur et al, 2007). The subject pilots placed the HWD near the right eye so that it was visible by glancing up which maintained unimpeded stereoscopic vision for out-the-window monitoring.…”

A review of head-worn display research at NASA Langley Research Center

“…[21][22][23] The usability study was conducted in the medium fidelty, fixed-based Visual Imaging Simulator for Transport Aircraft Systems (VISTAS) simulator. The usability study was designed to demonstrate the efficacy of a head-worn display which provides unlimited field-of-regard Synthetic Vision for surface operations.…”

Head-worn displays for NextGen

“…SAE AS8055 specifies the maximum allowable error of 7.5 mrad within 10° diameter of boresight using 2-standard deviation (sigma) allowances. The data from (Arthur et al, 2007; showed that the 2 standard deviation of azimuth rate of pilot's head movement was approximately 50 deg/sec. If we use this value and impose that the accuracy for equivalent-HUD performance must be less than 7.5 mrad (0.429 deg), the end-to-end system latency must be less than 10 msec to achieve HUD-equivalent levels of dynamic system performance (i.e., 0.429 deg/50 deg/sec ~ 9 msec latency).…”