In the frame of Clean Sky 2 JU, the HARVIS (Human Aircraft Roadmap for Virtual Intelligent System) project introduces a cockpit assistant committed to help the pilot to reroute the aircraft in single-pilot operations. A relevant scenario for this AI assistant is that in which diversion to alternate airfield is required after an emergency. Another interesting scenario is the anticipation of...
Complex activities require a sustained mental effort that causes cognitive fatigue. This fatigue may be the source of errors by disrupting action control. In this study, we examined its effects on reactive and proactive action control. Two groups performed a Simon task (a conflict task) after completing a fatigue-inducing task (a dual task combining a 2-back task and a parity judgment task,...
The aim of my intervention is to understand why as we are all convinced that Human Factors are a main part of the air safety, the science stay at the door of the cockpits, why human factors are not really integrated in trainings and why our authority don’t take account of these evidences.
I will present some directions to take into account human factor then tools we should trained and used to...
Let's have an experience. Read the following question and try to answer as sincerely as possible. Meanwhile, observe what’s going on in your mind. Here is the question: "What gift did you receive for Christmas?". To answer this question, we need to create a temporary internal mental space to which our attention will focus (Tulving, 2002). This attentional switch from external towards internal...
During recent years, Autonomous vehicles are considered one of the most important technology used in transportation, Several companies are racing to put self-driving vehicles on the road by 2020 like Uber for instance. Self-driving cars, autonomous car, driver-less cars - different names with common objectives, by using the new technologies such as machine learning and deep learning, we can...
Visual anticipation is an essential cognitive function in that it is necessary for action and is considered a key feature of Endsley's situational awareness model (1995, 2015). In recent decades, both research and industry have shown a growing interest in autonomous vehicles and, in this context, anticipation raises new questions. Indeed, human performances in automation situations decrease...
The proposed presentation gives an overview over the challenges introduced by giving control of multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) to the two-person crew of a manned transport helicopter, as well as research topics and possible solutions addressing these challenges.
The collaborative deployment of UAV with manned aircraft (Manned-Unmanned Teaming, MUM-T) can increase survivability and...
Early in the process of the development of an aircraft cockpit, although the designers always introduce a set of operational procedures with the expectation that all pilots would follow, it is very difficult to guarantee that the flight crew will do exactly they are expected to do. The deviation of the pilots’ operation from the intended procedures may lead to an unsafe situation, and could...
The unpredictable nature of human agents may bring considerable uncertainty to the possible outcomes of human-robot(s) interactions. On one hand, our knowledge of embedded decision algorithms and mission execution monitoring of robotic agents is quite well-known, on the other hand, our understand on human decision's and human agent's state monitoring still remains challenging tasks. Therefore,...
The modern manufacturing environment is very stressful for operators in charge of the production process. Unexpected events may deteriorate the operators' performance by increasing their mental stress and workload. To overcome this phenomenon, several production scheduling and rescheduling tools have been developed. Nowadays, these decision support systems (DSS) are assumed to reduce...
Piloting an aircraft takes place in a complex, changing and dynamic environment. It requires fast decision-making process and high level cognitive abilities, including executive functions. For instance, pilots need to process a lot of information, store data in short term memory, plan actions or regulate their own behavior in case of a stressful event. Executive functions also support...
Aircrafts are complex systems that are generating more and more data. An Airbus A320 equipped with FOMAX (Flight Operations and MAintenance eXchanger) records 24000 parameters and a Pratt & Whitney PW1000G GTF engine incorporates 5000 sensors, leading to terabytes of data being recorded for each flight. Modernization of military aircrafts and usage of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) fleets also...
Visual perceptual skills are considered to be a crucial ability accounting for the advantage of highly trained experts in many domains (Li et al., 2012). Indeed, expertise exerts a top-down modulation on gaze behavior and strategies. In this sense, experts with extensive training, domain knowledge, and experience can perceive important relationships among multiple information, enabling them to...
The avionics society is in constant demand to optimize aircraft performance and improve the interaction between pilots and aircraft. This paper aims with the design and implementation of a stable nonlinear sliding mode control strategy and haptic feedback on PMSM actuated sidesticks to improve the tracking performance. The controller currently used in aircraft is a cascade of PID controllers...
Driving is a complex activity taking place in a dynamic environment integrating risks and fatal situations. Many stressors (e.g, complexity of the situation, imminent danger, short or long exposure) may lead to stress states (e.g, anxiety, distress, fatigue). Stress states represent also a threat for drivers as they may affect emotions and cognitive abilities. It results in inappropriate...
Working memory (WM) plays an important role in pilots since they have to continuously integrate and dynamically update information within a rapidly changing environment. WM is essential for overcoming response conflict and for optimal selective attention performance. Yet, WM is a capacity-limited system and increasing the demands on WM reduces the ability to ignore irrelevant stimuli and can...
There is evidence that a high cognitive workload may hamper human performance. In the
context of piloting, it is important to investigate the factors that induce such situations. This can
be done using sensors that capture behavioral and physiological responses. However, used
sensors are often cumbersome and require physical contact (EEC, fNIRS). We need sensors that
can operate and access...
In recent years, eye-tracking is widely used in neuroergonomics and human factors research to explore visual screening and cognitive strategies during complex visuospatial tasks. More especially, aircraft, aerial vehicles, and space navigation require reliable spatial abilities that rely on a frame of reference, i.e. a perspective an operator chooses to describe a location in space or to...
When people do multiple tasks at the same time, it is often found that their performance is worse relative to when they do those same tasks in isolation. Indeed, error rates and response times (the Type 1 performance) have been repeatedly found to increase when multitasking. However, one aspect that has received little empirical attention in comparison, is whether observers are aware of these...
In the A400M operational test program led by the French Air Warfare Center, the Human Factor Department was tasked to carry out a workload analysis for tactical missions. The final objective is to define the profile of a third crew member. This additional crew member could be integrated in tactical missions to assist the two pilots crew.
The Human Factor specialists have used the following...
In aviation, knowing the internal state of pilots is desirable to prevent and detect abnormal situations such as an excessive cognitive workload (CW) or acute stress, both known to impact human performance [1]. Detecting these states becomes crucial with the possible emergence of Single Pilot Operations (SPO), during which tasks will be largely supported by a single pilot and the aircraft...
The high modularity and complexity of avionics systems make it difficult to use document-based methods to deal correctly and effectively with the systems design and validation. Yet model-based approaches are nowadays widely deployed to improve systems architecture design quality. While vast design space is encountered in the early stage of system design, it helps that the optimisation process...
Interactive methods have become well established in the flight crew training system, proving their relevance and topicality. We consider gamification as a way of game practices systematization in order to increase the training effectiveness for flight crews.
Considering the specifics of flight training and understanding the impossibility of working out every situation that may occur during...
The role of numerical simulation in product development has shifted from being a validation tool of mature designs into a means of exploration of product design space. Yet, the time required to run a simulation is, most of the time, a bottleneck in the engineer’s optimisation loop and for larger design spaces it can result in automated shape optimization being simply intractable. This needs to...
Many accident reports have stressed the fact that first officers sometimes follow risky choices made by captains, resulting in the mitigation of flight safety. While this tendency is well known in the field of aviation, few studies have examined the impact of captains’ influence on first officers’ decision-making and the associated neural correlates. The present study aimed to investigate the...
According to IATA (International Air Transport Association), 7.8 billion passengers will be travelling with air transportation in 2036. It means twice as many passengers as those in 2018. In order to keep up with this growth, aeronautics manufacturers are facing challenges in terms of production rate. Their goals are to speed up their production and reduce manufacturing costs as much as...
Background: Increasing cockpit automation and improved flight envelope protection on modern jet aircraft aim to reduce the risk of undesired flight states such as Loss of Control in Flight (LOC-I). However, evidence collected in recent Safety Reports by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) and International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) show that those measures pose new...
In airliner cockpits, pilots interact with aircraft systems via specialized interfaces, grouped into functional units and displayed on different screens dedicated to each of the crew’s main activities. They operate these systems and digital displays with physical controllers: buttons, switches, pulls, joysticks... (Vinot et al. 2016). Recently, many aircraft manufacturers and suppliers have...
The pilot might well be considered as the ultimate component of an aircraft, hence the importance of tailoring his training in order to optimise his performance.
Hypnotizability is a psychophysiological trait quite popular owing to its role in the cognitive control of pain. It is measured by scales, which allow to classify the general population as highly (highs), medium (mediums) and low...
Internal helicopter noise is one of the most unpleasant due to its high intensity, superior to any other transportation means (often above 110 dB). A top objective for the helicopter industry is to improve the acoustic comfort within the cabin to meet the growing demand from the passengers who would like to work or relax comfortably during a flight, and without hearing headsets.
Noise has an...
Introduction
The variation of cognitive workload (CW) can considerably impact the probability of human error due to distraction, mind-wandering or cognitive resources overload [1]. Besides, a high level of anxiety can provoke dangerous situations when pilots are not able to take control ensuring total precision and safety. The objective of this work is to assess whether state-anxiety,...
Research in human monitoring led to development of powerful tools for users-systems communication via recording electrophysiological data and sending them to the computer system. Eye and gaze tracking are standing as important methods for a broad range of human monitoring applications such as in neuroscience, psychology, industrial engineering, aeronautics, military, and medical expertise....
Drones steadily become a significant part of aviation, both in term of number of operations but also the economic value of the market, not to mention the societal benefits. However, for the safest integration with the traditional aviation system, in order to mitigate both air and ground risks, some equipment, tools, training and procedures regarding the operations of drones are required. This...
The IBC (“Intégration de Bases de Connaissance” - Knowledge Bases Integration) project addresses the question of ontology based data integration, in the context of the MMT (Man Machine Teaming) initiative. It aims at combining data residing in different actors (aircraft, drone, sattelite, … ) during an air mission scenario and providing users with a unified view of all available data, in a...
Neuroimaging classification with functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) can be used for applications such as Brain Computer Interface (BCI) and Brain Machine Interface (BMI). BCI/BMI provide a means for decoding brain signals into actions, thus providing a means of communication for people suffering with paralysis such as conditions such as locked-in syndrome (LIS), spinal cord injury...
Introduction
Flying is a multitasking and complex activity that requires high working memory, mental flexibility and inhibition abilities [1]. It is now well admitted that stressors (eg. fatigue, psychological stress) can impair this executive functioning to an extent that pilots fail to face task demands and to adapt to external contingencies [1]–[4]. Several solutions ranging from...
The original Multi-Attribute Task Battery (MATB) contains a set of interactive tasks that are representative of those performed during aircraft piloting (Comstock & Arnegard, 1992). More precisely, it requires participants to simultaneously perform four tasks that are distributed over the screen: a system monitoring task, a compensatory tracking task, an auditory communication task and a...
Smart cities are part of the ongoing advances in technology to provide a better life quality to its inhabitants. Urban mobility is one of the most important components of smart cities. Due to the growing number of vehicles in these cities, urban traffic congestion is becoming more common. In addition, finding places to park even in car parks is not easy for drivers who run in circles. Studies...
Helicopter ship landings are challenging operations appealing for further researches and innovations to help pilots safely dealing with a variety of environmental, visual and operational contexts. Indeed, landing on ship not only differs from land-based landings in the extent that the landing area is located on the flight deck, which is most of the time oscillating, but also because the visual...
Eye tracking is often used in aviation to study the pilot's visual circuits, which are relevant to the first two stages of eye tracking integration [1]. However, the sensors can be expensive or difficult to integrate in a cockpit and can be sensitive to light variations. We propose to start studying the movements of the pilot's head as a proxy of their visual interest, because the sensors are...
In this prospective poster presentation, an overview is given of the family of generalized artificial memory structures designed to accommodate and use knowledge of an extra-large domain of complex (off-nominal) flight situations - corner cases with multiple risks. These structures are considered as a carrier of the situational (tactical) level knowledge base of an anthropomorphic artificial...
During Human–computer interaction (HCI), human can distinguish his own actions from the actions caused by the system or an external event. This feeling is called “Sense of Agency” (SoA; Gallagher, 2000). This form of self-awareness is important not only for motor control but also for the ascription of causal responsibility and serves as a key motivational force for human behaviour....
While most modern commercial airplanes are flown with two pilots, long haul flight operations require augmented flight crews. While the normal crew complement conducts the takeoff, climb-out and initial en route segments, additional pilots are on-board. These ‘relief’ pilots will be rested and ready to take over the flying duties later in the flight. Flight duty times and preand post-flight...
Introduction
Automatic speech recognition system (ASR) contains three main parts: an acoustic model, a lexicon and a language model. ASR in noisy environments is still a challenging goal because the acoustic information is not reliable and decreases the recognition accuracy. Better language model gives limited performance improvement, modeling mainly local syntactic information. In...
The sense of agency experienced in joint action is thus a central subjective dimension of human sociality. In a series of 3 experiments, we explore the development of we-agency when interacting with robot. Combining a Social Simon
task with the intentional binding effect, we explore (1) the emergence of self and we-agency in joint action and (2) the impact of the nature of the partner (human...
In the domain of air traffic, two planes are considered as in a conflict situation when their trajectories cross each other in certain circumstances of distance at the same time. Air Traffic Management (ATM) has adopted some rules to avoid such conflicts but the increasing density of aircraft flights makes conflict situations more and more difficult to anticipate and solve in an optimal way....
In aviation, the physiological monitoring of pilots can be useful to estimate the pilot's mental and physical state and to help understand their performance. So far, most of this physiological monitoring takes place inside labs or flight simulators, as some physiological sensors are still rather unwieldy in a plane or uncomfortable for the pilot, or are still expensive, such as EEG or fNIRS....
Machine learning has been widely applied to many traditional fields. The aviation field is not a stranger to automation, but the increasing number of automation systems in the cockpit makes pilots experience difficulty in keeping themselves within the decision loop. One possible solution to this situation is creating an A.I. assisting system instead of replacing humans with machines. The first...
To carry out their missions successfully, pilots must perform a certain number of actions to configure their user interface and carry out complex tasks (monitoring of the tactical situation, sensors, communication, tracks identification ...). This can be tedious and critical during high workload phases of the mission as an important number of actions are required in short time spans. In this...
Since the 1980s, the evolution of cockpits in aeronautics has been characterized by a variation in the tasks to be performed by crew members. This continuous variation is accompanied in particular by an increasing number of cognitively demanding tasks to be performed synchronously, under strong time constraints. Due to the limitations of attention resources (e.g., Moray, 1967 ; Kahneman, 1973)...
97% of Non-Stabilized Approach (NSA) are continued until landing going against Standard Operational Procedures (SOP). For some of these approaches, the reason is a lack of situation awareness for others it is because of operational constraints that standard SOP do not take into account like ATC, remaining fuel on board, weather... Most of the time everything goes well but pilots often admit...
Integration of Unmanned Aircraft in non-segregated airspace is one of the major challenges preventing a wide deployment of UAS systems. A key component in achieving airspace integration is the Command and Control Link. Collins Aerospace has been working in supporting standardization efforts and developing a certifiable, small and light Line of Sight C2 link solution for UAV. The intent of the...
Piloting aircraft is a demanding task in a dynamic, uncertain environment [1]. Attention distribution is a key issue for piloting, relying on a tradeoff between focused and divided attention (i.e., avoiding distraction or detecting changes). Their homeostasis may be dismissed when demand exceeds mental capacity, canceling out the processing of incoming stimuli (e.g. auditory alarms). For...
