How to Design Intuitive Flight Controls for Novice Onboard Operators?
摘要
It is common knowledge that piloting a rotorcraft is a sophisticated task generating high levels of both cognitive and physical cost as it requires critical capacities of information aggregation and versatility. Thus, the average car driver is yet to be in capacity to pilot them daily. Yet, in the context of Urban Air Mobility (UAM), many contemplate rotary wing aircraft as a viable option to switch current matter of urban traffic to 3D-space. The core idea is to widen access to individual rotorcraft so operators with a level of training similar to a driver’s license can fly them as Personal Air Vehicles (PAV). From that perspective, providing intuitive flight controls is vital. Recent studies on piloting assistance propose various designs to improve performance and alleviate workload. Nonetheless, they apparently struggle to draw consensus on acceptability, albeit central. Ergo, which objective criterion should be pondered to guarantee acceptability? In this paper, we make the assumption that intuitiveness is a sufficient condition. By defining an intuitive behaviour as the capacity for the operator to interact with system controls to output a behaviour close to the one observed in human motor control, we inherit from established metrics of task difficulty, reference trajectory and kinematics, regardless of control laws. Accordingly, we select a slalom to experimentally illustrate the common scenario of car driving to test against a pilot-in-the-loop simulator by non-pilot participants. Experiments cover two conditions of control laws and the Index of Difficulty (ID) is varied through different simulation scenes. Simulated rotorcraft trajectory is fitted on Fajen and Warren model of human walk and phase portrait characteristics identified by Mottet and Bootsma on kinematics are reproduced despite the presence of intermediate flight controls dynamics.