Vibro-Tactile Interface for Enhancing Piloting Abilities During Long Term Flight

Sylvain Cardin; Frédéric Vexo; Daniel Thalmann

doi:10.20965/jrm.2006.p0381

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JRM Vol.18 No.4 pp. 381-391

doi: 10.20965/jrm.2006.p0381

(2006)

Paper:

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Vibro-Tactile Interface for Enhancing Piloting Abilities During Long Term Flight

Sylvain Cardin, Frédéric Vexo, and Daniel Thalmann

Virtual Reality Laboratory, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), IC ISIM VRLAB, Station 14, CH-1015, Lausanne, Switzerland

Received:

January 16, 2006

Accepted:

April 17, 2006

Published:

August 20, 2006

Keywords:

vibro-tactile, embedded system, piloting enhancement, wearable

Abstract

Heading perception of an aircraft becomes uneasy under disturbing spatial disorientation for a single pilot performing the daily tasks inherent to a long term flight. Sleepiness, movements and other activities introduced by vital function necessity reduce the attention and the awareness of the current aircraft situation. This paper presents the development of a system which aims at decreasing the attention needs for maintaining an aircraft’s attitude and take corrective action when the autopilot goes off bound. An embedded system has been integrated in the pilot’s clothing. It sends vibro-tactile feedback to the pilot when his aircraft becomes off balance. The system also dynamically localizes the position of the actuators in order to insure a feedback constant in space independently form the pilot posture and movements. A series of tests have been conducted to validate the interest of this localization by showing a slight improvement in the response time needed to take corrective action. By increasing the pilot’s own feeling about his plane’s orientation, the system provides a complementary tool to improve exhausting long flight conditions.

Cite this article as:

S. Cardin, F. Vexo, and D. Thalmann, “Vibro-Tactile Interface for Enhancing Piloting Abilities During Long Term Flight,” J. Robot. Mechatron., Vol.18 No.4, pp. 381-391, 2006.

Data files:

References

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This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internationa License.

[1] [1] G. P. Taylor, “Warfighter endurance management during continuous flight and ground operation.”

[2] [2] M. Guerraz, D. Poquin, and T. Ohlmann, “The role of head-centric spatial reference with a static and kinetic visual disturbance,” Percept Psychophys, Vol.60, No.2, pp. 287-295, 1998.

[3] [3] S. Durnford, J. Crowley, N. Rosado, J. Harper, and S. Deroche, “Spatial disorientation: A survey of U.S. Army helicopter accidents,” 1987-1992.

[4] [4] J. Van Erp, H. Van Veen, C. Janseen, and T. Dobbins, “Vibrotactile Waypoint Navigation at Sea and in the Air: two Case study,” ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, 2005.

[5] [5] A. H. Rupert, B. J. McGrath, and M. Griffin, “A Tool to Maintain Spatial Orientation and Situation Awareness for Operators of Manned and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and other Military Motion platforms,” RTO HFM Symposium on “Spatial Disorientation in Military Vehicles: Causes, Consequences and Cures,” 31.1-31.15, 2002.

[6] [6] J. B. F. van Erp, “Guidelines for the use of vibro-tactile displays in Human computer interaction,” In Proc. Of Eurohaptics 2002, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, pp. 18-22, 2002.

[7] [7] R. T. Verrillo, “Temporal summation in vibrotactile sensitivity,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 37, pp. 843-846, 1965.

[8] [8] J. F. Hahn, “Vibrotactile adaptation and recovery measured by two methods,” Journal of Experimental Psychology, 71, pp. 655-658, 1966.

[9] [9] J. C. Craig, “Difference threshold for intensity of tactile stimuli,” Perception & Psychophysics, 11, pp. 150-152, 1972.

[10] [10] G. D. Goff, “Differential discrimination of frequency of cutaneous mechanical vibration,” Journal of Experimental Psychology, 74, pp. 294-299, 1967.

[11] [11] G. A. Gescheider, “Temporal relations in cutaneous stimulation,” In: Cutaneous communication systems and devices, edited by F. A. Geldard. Austin, Tex.: The Psychonimic society, 1974.

[12] [12] J. B. F. van Erp, “Vibrotactile spatial acuity on the torso: effects of location and timing parameters,” In Proceedings of the First Joint Eurohaptics Conference and Symposium on Haptic interfaces For Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Systems (Whc’05), Vol.00, pp. 80-85, 2005.

[13] [13] A. P. Hillstrom, K. Shapiro, and C. Spence, “Attentional and perceptual limitations in processing sequentially presented vibrotactile targets,” Perception & psychophysics 64, pp. 1068-1082, 2002.

[14] [14] J. C. Craig, and P. M. Evans, “Vibrotactile masking and the persistence of tactual features,” Perception & Psychophysics, 42, pp. 309-317, 1987.

[15] [15] A. Gallace, H. Z. Tan, and C. Spence, “Tactile change detection,” In Proceedings of the First Joint Eurohaptics Conference and Symposium on Haptic interfaces For Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Systems (Whc’05), Vol.00, pp. 12-16, 2005.

[16] [16] U. Yang, Y. Jang, and G. J. Kim, “Designing a Vibro-Tactile wear for “Close Range” Interaction for VR-based Motion Training,” ICAT 2002, 2002.

[17] [17] M. Wexler, F. Panerai, I. Lamouret, and J. Droulez, “Self-motion and the perception of stationary objects,” Nature, 409, pp. 85-88, 2001.

[18] [18] J. B. F. van Erp, and H. A. A. C. van Veen, “A Multipurpose Tactile Vest for Astronauts in the International Space Station,” Proc. Of Eurohaptics 2003, pp. 405-408, 2003.

[19] [19] A. Meyer,
www.x-plane.com

[20] [20] Ascention technology Corporation,
http://www.ascension-tech.com

[21] [21] Microchip,
http://www.microchip.com

[22] [22] 3D Mental Vision project,
http://vrlab.epfl.ch/˜apeternier/mvisio.html