Evaluation of Tactile Drift Displays in Helicopter

Abstract

Brownout during helicopter landing and takeoff is a serious problem and has caused numerous accidents. Development of displays indicating drift is one part of the solution, and since the visual modality is already saturated one possibility is to use a tactile display. The main purpose in this study was to investigate how tactile displays should be coded to maintain or increase the ability to control lateral drift. Two different tactile drift display configurations were compared, each with three different onset rates to indicate the speed of lateral drift. A visual drift display was used as control condition. The results show that best performance is obtained with the basic display with slow onset, and with complex display with constant onset rate. The results also showed that performance with the best tactile drift display configurations was equal to the already validated visual display.

Vibrotactile Displays: A Survey With a View on Highly Automated Driving

“…V ISUAL and auditory displays have traditionally been the most common modes of communication between machine and human. There is now an extensive, and still growing, research base on the effects of visual and auditory displays on human performance and behavior [1], [2].…”

“…In the past two decades, the potential of tactile displays has been increasingly investigated, with a particular focus on the application areas of tele-operation [1], aviation [2], military [3], and automotive [4]- [6]. Recently, tactile displays have also made their introduction to the automotive consumer market.…”

“…A tactile waist belt with eight tactors (i.e., separations of 45 deg) was used to indicate the direction of the next waypoint while temporal dynamic stimuli indicated the distance to that waypoint. With a similar algorithm (stimulus location indicating direction, and temporal dynamic stimuli indicating velocity), it has been shown that tactile cues presented on the torso of a helicopter pilot reduced lateral drift [3], [68] and contributed to a performance equivalent to that obtained with augmented visual feedback (a bar indicating the lateral drift) [2]. In their meta-analysis, Prewett et al [60] argued that the effectiveness of tactile displays compared to visual ones is highly dependent on the task and context.…”