(Georgia Institute of Technology., 2012-11)
Watts, Robert; Christmann, Hans Claus; Johnson, Eric N.; Feigh, Karen M.; Tsiotras, Panagiotis
Handling en route emergencies in modern transport aircraft through adequate teamwork between the pilot, the crew and the aircraft’s automation systems is an ongoing and active field of research. An automated path planning aid tool can assist pilots with the tasks of selecting a convenient landing site and developing a safe path to land at this site in the event of an onboard emergency. This paper highlights the pilot evaluation results of a human factors study as part of such a proposed automated planning aid. Focusing on the interactions between the pilot and the automated planning aid, the presented results suggest that a particular implementation of the pilot aid interface, which uses a simple dial to sort the most promising landing sites, was effective. This selectable sorting capability, motivated by the anticipated cognitive mode of the pilot crew, improved the quality of the selected site for the majority of the cases tested. Although the presented approach increased the average time required for the selection of an alternate landing site, it decreased the time to complete the task in the case of emergencies unfamiliar to the pilot crew.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2010-08)
Christmann, Hans Claus; Johnson, Eric N.
The presented work introduces a graph based approach to model urban (or otherwise
cluttered) environments for UAS utilization beyond line-of-sight as well as out of direct
R/F range of the operator's control station. Making the assumption that some a priori data
of the environment is available, the proposed method uses a classification of obstacles with
respect to their impact on UAV motion and R/F communication and generates continuously
updateable graphs usable to compute traverseable paths for UAVs while maintaining R/F
communication.
Using a simulated urban scenario this work shows that the proposed modeling method
allows to find reachable loiter or hover areas for UAVs in order to establish a multi-hop
R/F communication link between a primary UAV and its remote operator by utilizing an
overlay of motion (Voronoi based) and R/F (visibility based) specific mapping methods.