TriControl – A Multimodal Air Traffic Controller Working Position

Abstract

The TriControl multimodal controller working position (CWP) demonstrates a novel concept for natural humancomputer interaction in Air Traffic Control (ATC) by integrating speech recognition, eye tracking and multi-touch sensing. All three parts of a controller command – aircraft identifier, command type and value – are inserted by the controllers via different modalities in parallel. The combination of natural gazes at aircraft radar labels, simple multi-touch gestures, and utterances of equivalent values are sufficient to initiate commands to be sent to pilots. This reduces both controller workload and the time needed to initiate controller commands. The concept promises easy, well-adjusted, and intuitive human computer interaction.