Research on the influence of pilot workload on local route path planning of helicopters in low-altitude penetration

Abstract

Targeting the problem of high pilot workload caused by trajectory planning of low altitude penetration, this paper proposed a trajectory planning method considering the pilot workload. Firstly, by decomposing the three-dimensional trajectory into horizontal and vertical directions, the trajectory tree method based on the dynamic programming technique is used for horizontal trajectory planning, and the comprehensive slope-curvature limitation method is used for altitude trajectory planning. Then, a method was proposed to quantify the control inputs and pilot workload based on trajectory tracking simulation. The pilot workload cost, together with flight altitude cost and route length cost, was added to the local planning of a reference trajectory. To solve the problem of dimension explosion in trajectory tree search, a segmented optimal route tree algorithm is proposed. Finally, the simulation results show that the proposed method can effectively consider the pilot workload in trajectory planning, which is helpful to improve the flight ability of the planning trajectory and reduce the pilot workload at the same time.