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In a free-flight airspace environment, pilots have more freedom to choose user-preferred trajectories. An onboard pilot support system is needed that exploits travel freedom while maintaining spatial separation with other traffic. Ecological interface design is used to design an interface tool that assists pilots with the tactical planning of efficient conflict-free trajectories toward their destination. Desired pilot actions emerge from the visualization of workspace affordances in terms of a suitable description of aircraft (loco)motion. Traditional models and descriptions for aircraft motion cannot be applied efficiently for this purpose. Through functional modeling, more suitable locomotion models for trajectory planning are analyzed. As a result, a novel interface, the state vector envelope, is presented that is intended to provide the pilot with both low-level information, allowing direct action, and high-level information, allowing conflict understanding and situation awareness.

Driver assistance systems that supply force feedback (FF) on the accelerator commonly use relative distance and velocity with respect to the closest lead vehicle in front of the own vehicle. This 1-D feedback might not accurately represent the situation and can cause unwanted step-shaped changes in the FFs during lateral maneuvers. To address these shortcomings, a 2-D system is proposed that calculates FF using a weighted average of the influences of lead vehicles. Offline simulations and an experiment in a driving simulator were performed to compare no feedback, 1-D systems, and the novel 2-D system during a car-following task with cut-in maneuvers. Results show that the 2-D feedback resulted in lower mean forces, lower response times to cut-in vehicles, and favorable subjective experiences as compared to the 1-D systems.

The feedback upon which operators in teleoperation tasks base their control actions differs substantially from the feedback to the driver of a vehicle. On the one hand, there is often a lack of sensory information; on the other hand, there is additional status information presented via the visual channel. Haptic feedback could be used to unload the visual channel and to compensate for the lack of feedback in other modalities. For collision avoidance, haptic feedback could provide repulsive forces via the control inceptor. Haptic feedback allows operators to interpret the repulsive forces as impedance to their control deflections when a potential for collision exists. Haptic information can be generated from an artificial force field (AFF) that maps environment constraints to repulsive forces. This paper describes the design and theoretical evaluation of a novel AFF, i.e., the parametric risk field, for teleoperation of an uninhabited aerial vehicle (UAV). The field allows adjustments of the size, shape, and force gradient by means of parameter settings, which determine the sensitivity of the field. Computer simulations were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the field for collision avoidance for various parameter settings. Results indicate that the novel AFF more effectively performs the collision avoidance function than potential fields known from literature. Because of its smaller size, the field yields lower repulsive forces, results in less force cancellation effects, and allows for larger UAV velocities. This indicates less operator control demand and more effective UAV operations, both expected to lead to lower operator workload, while, at the same time, increasing safety.

When designing Air Traffic Control (ATC) sectors and procedures, traffic complexity and workload are important issues. For predicting ATC workload, metrics based on the Solution Space Diagram (SSD) have been proposed. This paper studies the effect of sector design on workload and SSD metrics. When considering the SSD in evaluation of a sector, each aircraft within the sector introduces a zone of conflict, the Forbidden Beam Zone (FBZ), on the SSD. The properties of these FBZ are systematically studied to increase understanding of the SSD usability in assessing workload and sector complexity. The effects of sector design variables on Air Traffic Controller (ATCo) workload and also SSD properties were evaluated. Example of sector properties are, number of streams to be merged, the merge angle, the proximity of incoming aircraft and the variability of traffic mix of small and large aircraft. Based on the findings, each sector design variable leads to different effect on both workload and SSD properties. Apart from that, correlation between the workload and the SSD properties were found to be in a higher level than of the number of aircraft within the sector, proving that the SSD-based analysis to be a good workload indicator. These correlations were studied based on two different groups of subjects with ranging experience in order to demonstrate the robustness of the method.

In the coming decades, the task of an air traffic controller is expected to shift to one of strategic, trajectorybased air traffic management. This form of air traffic control is no longer possible without the help of automated support tools. In previous research, it has been shown that the time-space diagram, combined with a conventional plan view display is a good candidate for supporting an air traffic controller with the inbound planning task in the future situation. However, in this initial study, the vertical plane was not yet fully included. Secondly, during an initial validation experiment, creating and maintaining a ’mental picture’ of the traffic was reported to be a difficult task. These findings lead to the re-design of the interface in the current research, which focuses on implementing the vertical plane and improving the integration of information across the successive displays. An experiment has been performed with a PC-based simulation which validates that the enhanced interface can be used to manage the air traffic safely and efficiently. Secondly, it has been shown that the ability to manipulate the speed of an aircraft in the adjacent sector can significantly increase situation awareness and reduce controller workload.