Airplane Cockpit Research Articles

Aircraft Cockpit Interaction in Virtual Reality with Visual, Auditive, and Vibrotactile Feedback

Safety-critical interactive spaces for supervision and time-critical control tasks are usually characterized by many small displays and physical controls, typically found in control rooms or automotive, railway, and aviation cockpits. Using Virtual Reality (VR) simulations instead of a physical system can significantly reduce the training costs of these interactive spaces without risking real-world accidents or occupying expensive physical simulators. However, the user's physical interactions and feedback methods must be technologically mediated. Therefore, we conducted a within-subjects study with 24 participants and compared performance, task load, and simulator sickness during training of authentic aircraft cockpit manipulation tasks. The participants were asked to perform these tasks inside a VR flight simulator (VRFS) for three feedback methods (acoustic, haptic, and acoustic+haptic) and inside a physical flight simulator (PFS) of a commercial airplane cockpit. The study revealed a partial equivalence of VRFS and PFS, control-specific differences input elements, irrelevance of rudimentary vibrotactile feedback, slower movements in VR, as well as a preference for PFS.

Criticality-based allocation of active redundancies for asymmetric components in coherent systems

The active redundancy technique is widely used in reliability engineering to enhance the performance of reliability systems. In this paper, we utilize the criticality ordering to study optimal allocations of active redundancies in coherent systems comprising independent components. Firstly, we establish optimal allocation strategies for two heterogeneous active redundancies for components ranked by the criticality ordering, which is characterized by the structure relationships induced from the associated minimal cut sets. Our findings demonstrate that, under certain conditions where the criticality ordering (and reliability performances) between any two original components is required, the stronger redundancy should be allocated to the more critical component. Secondly, we investigate the best allocation policies for a batch of homogeneous active spares for different components while preserving the criticality ordering. It is shown that allocating more active redundancies to the more critical component results in a more reliable coherent system. Additionally, we prove that under certain conditions, an imbalance in the numbers of allocated spares leads to even greater reliability in the system. Thirdly, we study optimal allocations for any two components in coherent systems when their locations are quantified by minimal path sets. The optimal allocation policies are further derived, most of which are similar to those obtained by applying minimal cut sets. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the main findings, and we apply our findings to a real-world scenario in an airplane cockpit system to enhance its reliability.

The effect of flight phase on electrodermal activity and gaze behavior: A simulator study

Current advances in airplane cockpit design and layout are often driven by a need to improve the pilot's awareness of the aircraft's state. This involves an improvement in the flow of information from aircraft to pilot. However, providing the aircraft with information on the pilot's state remains an open challenge. This work takes a first step towards determining the pilot's state based on biosensor data. We conducted a simulator study to record participants' electrodermal activity and gaze behavior, indicating pilot state changes during three distinct flight phases in an instrument failure scenario. The results show a significant difference in these psychophysiological measures between a phase of regular flight, the incident phase, and a phase with an additional troubleshooting task after the failure. The differences in the observed measures suggest great potential for a pilot-aware cockpit that can provide assistance based on the sensed pilot state.

Editorial: The Problem with Abbreviations and Acronyms

Editorial: The Problem with Abbreviations and Acronyms

Simulation Technology in Anesthesiology.

Simulation Technology in Anesthesiology.

The world within reach: An image database of reach-relevant environments.

Near-scale spaces are a key component of our visual experience: Whether for work or for leisure, we spend much of our days immersed in, and acting upon, the world within reach. Here, we present the Reachspace Database, a novel stimulus set containing over 10,000 images depicting first person, motor-relevant views at an approximated reachable scale (hereafter “reachspaces”), which reflect the visual input that an agent would experience while performing a task with her hands. These images are divided into over 350 categories, based on a taxonomy we developed, which captures information relating to the identity of each reachspace, including the broader setting and room it is found in, the locus of interaction (e.g., kitchen counter, desk), and the specific action it affords. Summary analyses of the taxonomy labels in the database suggest a tight connection between activities and the spaces that support them: While a small number of rooms and interaction loci afford many diverse actions (e.g., workshops, tables), most reachspaces were relatively specialized, typically affording only one main activity (e.g., gas station pump, airplane cockpit, kitchen cutting board). Overall, this Reachspace Database represents a large sampling of reachable environments and provides a new resource to support behavioral and neural research into the visual representation of reach-relevant environments. The database is available for download on the Open Science Framework (osf.io/bfyxk/).

Inverse design of the thermal environment in an airplane cockpit using the adjoint method with the momentum method

Currently, the thermal environment in airplane cockpits is unsatisfactory and pilots often complain about a strong draft sensation in the cockpit. It is caused by the unreasonable air supply diffusers design. One of the best approaches to design a better cockpit environment is the adjoint method. The method can simultaneously and efficiently identify the number, size, location, and shape of air supply inlets, and the air supply parameters. However, the real air diffuser needed to design often have grilles, especially in the airplane cockpit, and the current method can only design the inlet as an opening. This study combined the adjoint method with the momentum method to directly identify the optimal air supply diffusers with grilles to create optimal thermal environment in an airplane cockpit (1) under ideal conditions and (2) with realistic constraints. Under the ideal conditions, the resulting design provides an optimal thermal environment for the cockpit, but it might not be feasible in practice. The design with realistic constraints provides acceptable thermal comfort in the cockpit, but it is not optimal. Thus, there is an engineering trade-off between design feasibility and optimization. All in all, the adjoint method with the momentum method can be effectively used to identify real air supply diffusers.

Design and Realization of Gaze Gesture Control System for Flight Simulation

In airplane cockpit, flight crew, display interface, control device and onboard control device constitute a complex human computer interaction system. As a natural interaction way, eye movement can simplify the interaction process of pilots, avoiding mistakes caused by fatigue or distraction. What’s more, since this interactive modality only requires eye movement as input, it can be adapted to some special situations and free the user’s hands. In this paper, we design a gaze gesture interaction system for flight simulation and compare it with the existing prominent interaction methods.

A cockpit of multiple measures for assessing film restoration quality

In machine vision, the idea of expressing the quality of a films by a single value is very popular. Usually this value is computed by processing a set of image features with the aim of resembling as much as possible a kind of human judgment of the film quality. Since human quality assessment is a complex mechanism involving many different perceptual aspects, we believe that such approach may scarcely provide a comprehensive analysis. Especially in the field of digital movie restoration, a single score can hardly provide reliable information about the effects of the various restoring operations. For this reason we introduce an alternative approach, where a set of measures, describing over time basic global and local visual properties of the film frames, is computed in an unsupervised way and delivered to expert evaluators for checking the restoration pipeline and results. The proposed framework can be viewed as a car or airplane cockpit, whose parameters (i.e. the computed measures) are necessary to control the machine status and performance. This cockpit, which is publicly available online, would like to support the digital restoration process and its assessment.

Very Low Bitrate Semantic Compression of Airplane Cockpit Screen Content

This paper addresses the problem of encoding the video generated by the screen of an airplane cockpit. As other computer screens, cockpit screens consist of computer-generated graphics often atop a natural background. Existing screen content coding schemes fail notably in preserving the readability of textual information at the low bitrates required in avionic applications. We propose a screen coding scheme where textual information is encoded according to the relative semantics rather than in the pixel domain. The encoder localizes textual information, and the semantics of each character are extracted with a convolutional neural network and predictively encoded. Text is then removed via inpainting, and the residual background video is compressed with a standard codec and transmitted to the receiver together with the text semantics. At the decoder side, text is synthesized using the decoded semantics and superimposed over the decoded residual video recovering the original frame. Our proposed scheme offers two key advantages over a semantics-unaware scheme that encodes text in the pixel domain. First, the text readability at the decoder is not compromised by compression artifacts, whereas the relative bitrate is negligible. Second, removal of high-frequency transform coefficients associated with the inpainted text drastically reduces the bitrate of the residual video. Experiments with real cockpit video sequences show BD-rate gains up to 82% and 69% over a reference H.265/HEVC encoder and its screen content coding extension. Moreover, our scheme achieves quasi-errorless character recognition already at very low bitrates, whereas even HEVC-SCC needs at least three or four times more bitrate to achieve a comparable error rate.

Mixed-Methods Design for Analyzing Jeopardizing Situations by Means of Communication Profiles - Part I: "Simulation and Reduction of Coercive Measures in Psychiatry"

Psychiatric research needs more information about what happens in times using coercive measures. In their structure jeopardizing situations are fundamental different from allday-life situations (e. g. school lesson) or even other environmental crisis situations (e. g. airplane cockpit). Results of communication analysis of jeopardizing situations in psychiatry ward within mixed-methods design are presented for the first time. Data basis comprises videos of psychodramatical rearranged standard conflict situations. By means of deductive identification (N = 2338) of observed utterances and followed by statistical evaluation, quantitative and qualitative procedures are able to distinguish different scenes (in school education vs. psychiatry) and actor communication patterns (therapists vs. inpatients). Using declaratives (determining, regulating) and commissives (promising, threatening) the actor communication profiles are totally different. The methods enrich the psychiatric process- and conflict research. More results are given in SRZP-PART II to PART VI.

Safety Risk Assessment of Human-computer Interaction Behavior Based on Bayesian Network

Background: Safety risk assessment of human-computer interaction behavior is very important for safety design and management in complex human-computer system such as airplane cockpit and monitoring system in nuclear power plant. Many major accidents were a result of lack of efficient hazard identification and risk assessment approaches, as described in various patents. Keywords: Safety risk, human-computer system, assessment, Bayesian network, tree analysis, risk matrix.

NASA Mars mockup explores team cohesion and performance

How can astronauts best brave the confinement, isolation, and extreme conditions of extended stays away from Earth?

A Framework for Ergonomics Design of Transport Category Airplane Cockpit

The ergonomics design of transport category airplane cockpit is of great importance to the efficiency of flight crew operation and has a major impact on the flight safety. In this work, the ergonomics design elements in the cockpit are analyzed. The elements are collected from airworthiness regulations, industry standards, features of new generation airplane cockpit and the interaction process analysis results. Using hierarchical cluster approach, the ergonomics design elements are clustered, and the ergonomics design elements for transport category airplane cockpit are determined. The cockpit design process is presented on the basis of axiomatic design theory and a framework for ergonomics design of transport category airplane cockpit.

Strategies for Preventing Distractions and Interruptions in the OR

Stakeholders in the automotive industry, airline industry, and anesthesia profession have identified critical periods of time in which distractions and interruptions of normal processes can have devastating effects. Just as reducing distractions improves safety in an automobile or airplane cockpit, limiting distractions and interruptions during critical times in the perioperative setting can increase patient safety. We assessed perioperative nurses and identified what they perceived as critical phases of nursing care. We also worked with our anesthesia partners to address their concerns about interruptions during the administration of nerve blocks. The perioperative nurses at our hospital initiated strategies to reduce distractions or interruptions to their practice at critical points, and, in collaboration with surgical committee members, we developed strategies to reduce or eliminate distractions for anesthesia professionals during the preoperative administration of nerve blocks and to eliminate distractions for the RN circulator and scrub person during the final counts.

Design, Simulation and Implementation of an Active Sound-Noise Cancellation System for Use in a Cockpit Intercommunication System

In this paper, an active noise control system for denoising the intercommunication signal of an airplane cockpit isproposed. Noise sources such as engines degrade the quality of the intercommunication signal, especially in the caseof the pilot and copilot headsets. A two-microphone active adaptive noise controller is designed by using an adaptiveFIR filter in an active structure. The designed system is simulated and also implemented in real environment usingreal speech signals, periodic noise and AWGN noise. Also, an FPGA-based hardware implementation utilizing a novelmethod is provided. The whole design is considered an FPGA hardware core with low resource utilizations which issuitable for HW/SW codesign and System-on-Programmable-Chip (SoPC) applications. The codes have been writtenby using the VHDL93 hardware description language, the XilKernel embedded operating system and a finite statemachine. The obtained results showed competent functionality and performance of the proposed system. This ICSnoise removal architecture can be used on any cargo, civil or fighter platform (such as C-130, IR-AN 140 and F5-F)and also in radar and electronic warfare (EW) systems (for clutter/interference compensation) with minimum hardwareor software changes.

The Evaluation Method of Mental Workload on Visual Interface in Cockpit

Objective to establish a system to evaluate the mental workload on visual display interface in airplane cockpit after synthesizing three kinds of mental workload assessment techniques, i.e. main task measure method, physiology measure method and subjective evaluate method. Methods The evaluation indices of every kind of assessment techniques was defined, and the amount of each index through experiment and subjective inquiry was gained, weighted average was calculated and a quantification evaluation value of each kind of evaluation methods was got. At last, with weighted calculation of above three evaluation values, the evaluation value of mental workload on visual display interface in airplane cockpit was obtained Results in M kinds of different designs of visual display interface in airplane cockpit, the synthetic evaluation value of one design was the smallest and the mental workload of this design was the smallest. The design of the smallest mental workload was chosen prior as the final scheme of visual display interface in airplane cockpit .Conclusion The evaluation system is combined with present main evaluation methods of mental workload and utilizes their advantages. The evaluating results can be quantified more directly and clearly. With this evaluation system, the mental workload can be evaluated during the design of visual display interface of airplane cockpit and the best scheme can be confirmed.

Discussion Panel: Establishing in house Human Factors expert teams to enable comprehensive design of medical work units

The present discussion panel addresses the need and possible approaches for providing integrative and inclusive human factors design of medical work units. An associated question is whether such a design perspective can be achieved without the instantiation of in house human factors teams. While recognition of the general importance and possible contribution of human factors to efficiency and safety of health care is on the rise and is accompanied by a rapidly growing body research and publications; to date its focus has been mainly on individual systems and isolated work procedures. An important overlooked requirement is for a coherent and inclusive design of the global work unit (operating theater, hospital ward, neonatal unit, etc, etc), much the same way in which the overall configuration of an airplane cockpit or a process control room are considered. Furthermore, can such an inclusive perspective of work units be achieved, unless health care institutes establish in house human factors teams? These are the topics to be evaluated.

Geochemical characterization of single atmospheric particles from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano eruption event collected at ground-based sampling sites in Germany

Abstract Volcanic particles can be transported over long distances in the atmosphere and can cause severe problems for air traffic. This was the case over large areas of Europe in spring 2010 after the eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull (E15) volcano on Iceland. The scope of this work was to characterize these volcanic particles more in detail with regard to size and chemical composition in order to provide valuable information needed for a better estimation of the possible impact on airplane jet engines and cockpit windows. Another question of this study was which share of the overall atmospheric particles in Germany originated from the E15 eruption and whether this amount of volcanic particles could cause any adverse health effects to humans. To this end, single particle analysis by means of scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive X-ray analysis (SEM-EDX) and synchrotron radiation based micro X-ray fluorescence analysis (μS-XRF) together with multivariate statistical methods were applied for samples collected on ground-level in Southwest Germany and Iceland. Based on the obtained chemical fingerprints combined with multivariate statistical methods it was possible to discrimate between the amount of volcanic particles from Iceland and other atmospheric particles from non-volcanic sources. This aspect distinguishes this single particle approach from most other studies. The results of the study showed that at least 40% of the analyzed particles between 2.5 and 10 μm size at the remote sampling sites in the Black Forest area and about 25% in the city of Freiburg were clearly of volcanic origin from the E15 volcano eruption event.

De-noise Comprehensive Research On Airplane Cockpit Signals Recorded by CVR

The characteristic of cockpit sound recorded by CVR is the key evidence in investigating accident causes for wrecked aircraft. However, cockpit signals ( or CVR sound information) are complex, they include crew's voices (or pilot's voices), environmental noise and different kinds of backgrounds sound signals ,and many factors from inside and outside cockpit affects the analysis results, especially noise. To obtain the pure cockpit signal (no noise) from mixed cockpit signals, after CVR Signals’ classification, the comprehensive de-noise research for cockpit signals are made, including the DWT threshold de-noise, the cockpit sound’ ICA de-noising based on BSS and wavelet de-noise are put forward. Through different de-noise methods comparative research for cockpit signals, some valuable conclusion can be drawn in the end of the paper. These conclusions are very useful for judging and diagnosing the wreckage aircraft by pure cockpit signals (background sound signals).