Tactile Display Design for Securing Flight and Reducing the Saturation of Pilot's Visual Channel

Visual channel dominates the design of the cockpit, and auditory channel is progressively being used as well. However, tactile displays are almost abstract in the cockpit designs. Whereas, many research proved that several applications exist where the tactile displays may become an important or even essential choice. This is due to the fact that the visual feedback is not suitable, not adequate, or surcharged and that the visual attention is usually limited to a simple entity. In this paper, we propose a design of a low-cost tactile feedback system to provide the pilot with better insight in the flight path and prevent limitations during flight. In the first part of the paper, we develop an effective control strategy based on inverse dynamic to solve the problems of use of the low-cost tactors. The obtained results showed reduction of 48 % in settling time. The second part describes the use of Fuzzy Logic Controllers (FLC) to compute a new form of tactile output of the translation of a pertinent flight data information and flight envelope to vibrotactile feedback signals. And in the last part, we develop a wireless (and USB) vibrotactile feedback device consisting of 16 embedded tactors controlled with an inverse dynamic strategy via an arm Cortex M3 architecture. Pilots equipped with the developed tactile display were capable of successfully flying in a simulator. They confirm that tactile feedback is an interesting way of feeding back information about the airplane’s state, in order to give a better understanding of what the airplane is doing during controlled flight.