Visual Augmentation for Personal Air Vehicles During Flight Control System Degradation

Successful human intervention will be central to any emerging autonomous aerial transport platform, such as personal aerial vehicles (PAV), for the safe conduct of flight. This paper proposes a concept to compensate a partial failure of the autonomous flight guidance by handing over control of the aircraft to a passenger and analyzes the associated human factors. First, a novel waypoint guidance law is designed that generates the desired roll commands for navigation to a designated safe landing spot. Second, two novel guidance display concepts are developed, one for the primary flight display (PFD), and another for the helmet mounted display (HMD), which indicate the desired roll commanded by the guidance law. Third, the guidance law and display concepts are integrated into a high-fidelity, wide field-of-view flight simulation environment and a static mock-up of a conventional helicopter cockpit. Human-in-the-loop experiments were performed with test subjects to analyze the effectiveness of the guidance law and display concepts, and to evaluate piloting performance by non-professional pilots. Various mission task elements were analyzed in these experiments and, in order to intensify workload, a disturbance was included together with a guidance law for commanded roll of PAV. Navigation performance, test subjects’ ratings and workload are measured by a combination of objective and subjective analyses. Results indicate that all test subjects were able to reach a close vicinity of the landing spot. Furthermore, the HMD concept shows a lower workload with equal or better navigation performance when compared to the PFD concept.     «

Successful human intervention will be central to any emerging autonomous aerial transport platform, such as personal aerial vehicles (PAV), for the safe conduct of flight. This paper proposes a concept to compensate a partial failure of the autonomous flight guidance by handing over control of the aircraft to a passenger and analyzes the associated human factors. First, a novel waypoint guidance law is designed that generates the desired roll commands for navigation to a designated safe landing...     »