Evaluation of a Ranged-Gated Viewing Sensor with a Head-Mounted Display and Advanced Flight Control Modes for Helicopter Offshore Rescue Operation

Abstract

During offshore and maritime emergency missions, helicopter pilots are often confronted with challenging weather conditions. Strong winds, precipitation and visual degradation through sea fog can lead to dangerous situations such as a controlled flight into terrain due to an inadvertent entry into instrument meteorological conditions. Modern offshore helicopters are already equipped with vision sensors to support pilots, but yet without features to see through particle clouds such as fog. One solution to this problem is to combine range-gated visual sensors, as already used on sea rescue boats, with a sensor video visualization conformal to the outside world in a Head Mounted Display (HMD) as well as task-optimized control modes. In this work a system setup has been built up consisting of DLR's TRAGVIS ranged-gated sensor, a Microsoft HoloLens 2 HMD and a ship-relative translational rate command mode. The system was integrated into the simulation environment of DLR’s Air Vehicle Simulator and evaluated in a campaign by two pilots from the Flight Service of the German Federal Police. Results from the campaign show a potential benefit in flight safety from the system setup and revealed problems through the limited field-of-view of the sensor and the tinted glasses from the HMD.