Vibrotactile Display of Flight Attitude with Combination of Multiple Coding Parameters

Abstract

Vibrotactile (vibratory tactile) displays have been reported as effective in enhancing awareness of flight attitude for pilots and releasing other heavily loaded sensory channels. Although some work has been done on vibrotactile coding of flight attitude, there is lack of a systematic investigation into coding methods with combination of multiple coding parameters. In this paper, seven coding methods with seven combinations of multiple coding parameters (location, rhythm, intensity, and mode) were systematically studied to cue flight attitude for pilots with vibrotactile vest. We conducted two psychophysical experiments in a static environment in which the attitude information in the form of vibrotactile feedback are presented randomly, and quantitatively evaluated the effectiveness of the vest according to the users' recognition accuracy, reaction time and information transfer rate. The results show that vibrotactile vest is effective to cue attitude information. The preferred coding method with combinations of location, rhythm and mode allowed users to perform with lowest reaction time and highest recognition accuracy and yield about 255 bits/min of information transfer rate. Overall, the presented work provides valuable insights and guidance for the design of vibrotactile aids for the pilots.

A vibrotactile belt to display precise directional information for visually impaired

“…[21] The elastic belt should be spread naturally on a hard plane without any stretching before the tactors are bonded to the belt using strong adhesive. For the convenience of arranging tactors on the belt, the angular difference ( sðiÞ ¼ sðiþ1Þ À sðiÞ ) between each adjacent pair of tactors was converted to corresponding distance (D sðiÞ ) as shown in equation (2).…”

“…The favorable effects of vibrotactile (vibratory tactile) displays on navigation performance, situational awareness, and workload reduction have been shown for blind people, pilots and drivers [1,2,3]. Vibrotactile displays have been widely used to provide directional navigation cues such as guiding commands: backward, stop and forward [4]; turn-left, turn-right, and go-forward [5]; or cardinal directions: frontal, back, left, right [6].…”

Vibrotactile feedback as a countermeasure for spatial disorientation

“…One proposed countermeasure for spatial disorientation is vibrotactile feedback about body orientation provided by small vibrating devices on the skin (Cholewiak et al, 2004). Such feedback has been shown to improve performance (Wenzel and Godfroy-Cooper, 2021) in motion platform control (Bouak et al, 2011), flight simulators (Cardin et al, 2006;Ouyang et al, 2017), helicopter flight (Raj et al, 2000;Lawson and Rupert, 2014), and fixed wing aircraft flight (Rupert, 2000a;Rupert, 2000b). Additional vibrotactile uses include providing cockpit alerts (Salzer et al, 2011), cueing astronaut orientation in the International Space Station (van , performing a nulling task after being rotated in yaw to cause disorientation (van , and a nulling task after returning from spaceflight (Clément et al, 2018).…”