Evaluation of tactile drift displays in helicopter

Abstract

Brownout during helicopter landing and takeoff is a serious problem and has caused numerous accidents. Development of displays indicating drift is one part of the solution, and since the visual modality is already saturated one possibility is to use a tactile display. The main purpose in this study was to investigate how tactile displays should be coded to maintain or increase the ability to control lateral drift. Two different tactile drift display configurations were compared, each with three different onset rates to indicate the speed of lateral drift. A visual drift display was used as control condition. The results show that best performance is obtained with the basic display with slow onset, and with complex display with constant onset rate. The results also showed that performance with the best tactile drift display configurations was equal to the already validated visual display. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.