Evaluation of visual, tactile and bimodal display in simulated helicopter

Authors:

  • Patrik Lif
  • Per-Anders Oskarsson
  • Johan Hedström
  • Peter Andersson
  • Björn Lindahl
  • Anna Tullberg

Publish date: 2013-04-22

Report number: FOI-R--3650--SE

Pages: 25

Written in: Swedish

Keywords:

  • Display
  • bimodal
  • multimodal
  • tactile.

Abstract

Sweden, and many other countries, uses helicopters in Afghanistan to conduct medical evacuations. In such environments the probability of degraded visual environments due to brown-out is high. Statistics from NATO clearly shows that safety is a problem during start and landing in brown-out situations, and one of the major problems is lateral drift unnoticed by the pilot. In the simulator study presented here, the use of drift displays was investigated concerning performance of lateral drift, control of height, speed and heading. One basic display with no drift information and three drift displays (visual-, tactile, and bimodal) were used. The most important results from the study show that the use of any of the three drift displays improved performance and that the improvement for lateral drift were the same irrespective of drift display. This indicates that a tactile or bimodal display potentially can be used as a complement to the visual display to disengaging vision for other parallel tasks in the helicopter.