Ecological design of augmentation improves helicopter ship landing maneuvers: An approach in augmented virtuality

Abstract

Helicopter landing on a ship is a visually regulated "rendezvous" task during which pilots must use fine control to land a powerful rotorcraft on the deck of a moving ship tossed by the sea while minimizing the energy at impact. Although augmented reality assistance can be hypothesized to improve pilots’ performance and the safety of landing maneuvers by guiding action toward optimal behavior in complex and stressful situations, the question of the optimal information to be displayed to feed the pilots’ natural information-movement coupling remains to be investigated. Novice participants were instructed to land a simplified helicopter on a ship in a virtual reality simulator while minimizing energy at impact and landing duration. The wave amplitude and related ship heave were manipulated. We compared the benefits of two types of visual augmentation whose design was based on either solving cockpit-induced visual occlusion problems or strengthening the online regulation of the deceleration by keeping the current τ˙ variable around an ideal value of -0.5 to conduct smooth and efficient landing. Our results showed that the second augmentation, ecologically grounded, offers benefits at several levels of analysis. It decreases the landing duration, improves the control of the helicopter displacement, and sharpens the sensitivity to changes in τ˙. This underlines the importance for designers of augmented reality systems to collaborate with psychologists to identify the relevant perceptual-motor strategy that must be encouraged before designing an augmentation that will enhance it.

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

“…Secondly, we observed that the Augmentation enabled participants to time their deck-landing attempts optimally. These benefits are apparently greater than those obtained using the visual Augmentation method developed by Morice et al 23 , who did not find any significant improvement in . More generally speaking, the results obtained in the present study support the idea that understanding the agent/environment system in terms of what it affords is a fruitful approach to designing meaningful Augmentations.…”

“…Equation 1 ) were always held constant at 2.5 m and 0.14 Hz, respectively. This produced a sinusoidal ship heave movement in the range of those observed under the moderate sea conditions 23 , rendered here by the Crest Ocean System 37 . A cloudy sky featured in the background.…”

“…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 ).…”

Flying a helicopter with the HoloLens as head-mounted display

“…It has been shown in many previous works that HMDs can evidently reduce pilots' workload and increase their situational awareness. [20][21][22][23][24][25][26] Especially in environments with outside visual references, HMDs provide additional visual cues.…”