Development and Pilot-In-The-Loop Evaluation of Robust Upset-Recovery Guidance

Aircraft Loss-Of-Control (LOC) has been a longstanding contributor to fatal aviation accidents. The research presented herein is structured to directly address several known contributing and causal factors associated with vehicle upset and LOC. This paper discusses the development and evaluation of an approach to improve flight safety by visually providing closed-loop guidance for upset recovery that is robust to pilot behavior variation and is able to accommodate vehicle failures and impairment. The Damage Adaptive Guidance for piloted Upset Recovery (DAGUR) system provides continuous closed-loop recovery guidance via visual cues to reduce instances of inappropriate pilot reaction and pilot inaction. Adaptation enables the recovery module to provide appropriate guidance even in cases of vehicle damage or impairment. The recovery guidance system is also specifically designed to be robust to variations in pilot dynamic behavior (including behavior associated with high-stress situations). The adaptive recovery guidance is implemented “upstream” of the pilot and provided via visual cues; therefore it does not require modifications to existing flight control software (for fly-by-wire aircraft) and is equally applicable to non-fly-by-wire aircraft. Included desktop simulation and pilot-in-the-loop evaluation results show that the upset recovery guidance system is able to provide effective guidance for recovery from a variety of post-stall and unusual attitude upsets including cases of hardover control surface failures and that the recovery guidance is robust to large variations in pilot dynamic behavior. Additionally, pilots who evaluated the system indicated that they found the guidance to be useful and intuitive, and that it provided timely and measured recovery guidance. Quantitatively, the pilot-in-the-loop evaluation revealed that the recovery guidance significantly reduced subject pilot inceptor frequency content magnitude (energy) and the associated vehicle response.

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