Tactile Display for Aircraft Control

Tactile Instrument for Aviation

“…In their review of the Hirsch and Kadushin tactile display, Triggs, Levison, and Sanneman (1974) hypothesized that the limitations can be attributed in part to the lack of separation between the stimuli applied to the thumb and forefinger. In their experiments, Ross et al (1973) found that "the most suitable tactor excitation code tested to date has been one in which the outermost tactor is always excited first, thus providing maximal spatial separation for even small error displays. "…”

“…Why is it that none of the earlier aviation tactile instruments have progressed past the proposal phase (Ballard and Hessinger, 1954;Zlotnik, 1988) or the laboratory phase (Ross et al 1973;Gilliland and Schlegel, 1994) and into a real aircraft cockpit? Only the hybrid kinesthetic and tactile display developed by Gilson and Fenton (1974) was tested in an aircraft, but this display never progressed to commercial development.…”

“…In the case of the electrocutaneous tactors, the range between absolute threshold and pain is very small and this dynamic range of usability varies with skin environmental conditions. This caused both detection and user acceptability problems (Ross et al 1973).…”