Combining Enhanced and Synthetic Vision for Autonomous All-Weather Approach and Landing

Abstract

This article is about the design and evaluation of the human–machine interface of an enhanced and synthetic vision system. Several tunnel-in-the-sky and pathway-in-the-sky concepts including scene-linking elements have been evaluated. Pathway-in-the-sky displays enable pilots to accurately fly difficult trajectories. However, these displays may drive pilots' attention to the aircraft guidance task at the expense of other tasks, particularly when the pathway display is located head-down. A pathway head-up display (HUD) might be a viable solution to overcome this disadvantage. Moreover, the pathway might mitigate the perceptual segregation between the static near domain and the dynamic far domain and hence might improve attention switching between both sources. To more comprehensively overcome the perceptual near-to-far domain disconnect, alphanumeric symbols could be attached to the pathway leading to an HUD design concept called scene linking. A scene-linked pathway-predictor concept was implemented on a monocular retinal scanning head-mounted device (HMD) in combination with an optical head tracker. The evaluation comprises low-fidelity part-task simulations, high-fidelity simulator runs, and flight trials. Where laboratory experiments found evidence in favor of scene-linked pathway HUDs or HMDs, the real flight tests could not fully support this display concept. Even so, in all studies evidence has been found that the head-up pathway concept could be superior to current head-up solutions.