Combining Enhanced and Synthetic Vision for Autonomous All Weather Approach and Landing

Abstract

This paper is about the design and evaluation of the HMI of an Enhanced and Synthetic Vision system. Several tunnel-in-the-sky and pathway-in-the-sky concepts including ‘scene-linking’ elements have been evaluated. Pathway-in-the-sky displays enable pilots to accurately fly difficult trajectories. However, these displays may drive pilots’ attention to the aircraft guidance task at the expense of other tasks particularly when the pathway display is located head-down. A pathway HUD may be a viable solution to overcome this disadvantage. Moreover, the pathway may mitigate the perceptual segregation between the static near domain and the dynamic far domain and hence, may improve attention switching between both sources. In order to more comprehensively overcome the perceptual near-to-far domain disconnect alphanumeric symbols could be attached to the pathway leading to a HUD design concept called ‘scene-linking’. A scene-linked pathway-predictor concept was implemented on a monocular retinal scanning HMD in combination with an optical head tracker. The evaluation comprises low fidelity part-task simulations, high fidelity simulators runs and flight trials. Where laboratory experiments found evidence in favor for scene-linked pathway head-up or head-mounted devices the real flight tests could not fully support this display concept. Even so, in all studies evidence has been found that the head-up pathway concept could be superior to present head-up solutions.