Influence of Optical and Gravito-Inertial Cues to Height Perception During Supervisory Control

Future vertical lift (FVL) missions will be characterized by increased agility, degraded visual environments (DVE) and optionally piloted vehicles (OPVs). Increased agility will induce more frequent variations of linear and angular accelerations, while DVE will reduce the structure and quality of the out-the-window (OTW) scene (i.e. optical flow). As helicopters become faster and more agile, pilots are expected to navigate at low altitudes while traveling at high speeds. In nap of the earth (NOE) flights, the perception of self-position and orientation provided by visual, vestibular, and proprioceptive cues can vary from moment to moment due to visibility conditions and body alignment as a response to gravitoinertial forces and internally/externally induced perturbations. As a result, erroneous perceptions of the self and the environment can arise, leading ultimately to spatial disorientation (SD). In OPV conditions, the use of different autopilot modes implies a modification of pilot role from active pilot to systems supervisor. This shift in paradigm, where pilotage is not the primary task, and where feedback from the controls is no more available, is not without consequences. Of importance is the evidence that space perception and its geometric properties can be strongly modulated by the active or passive nature of the displacement in space. An experiment was conducted using the vertical motion simulator (VMS) at the NASA Ames Research Center that examined the contributions of gravitoinertial cueing and visual cueing in a task where the pilot was not in control of the aircraft but was asked to perform altitude monitoring in a simulated UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter with a simulated autopilot (AP) mode. Within the altitude monitoring task, the global optical density (OD), flow rate and visual level of detail (LOD) were manipulated by the introduction of an 18ft vertical drift, upward or downward that simulates a vertical wind shift. Seven pilots were tested in two visual meteorological conditions, good visual environment (GVE) and degraded visual environment (DVE) and two gravitoinertial conditions, where platform motion was either ON or OFF. The results showed that both the good quality of the visual environment and the presence of gravitoinertial cues improved altitude awareness and reduced detection/ reaction times. The improvement of the tracking performance in the visuo-vestibular setting as compared to a visual only setting when the visual cues were poor indicated some level of multisensory integration. Task-dependent limitations of a popular aeronautics metric called DIMSS-PM (Dynamic Interface Modeling and Simulation System Product Metric) and its sub-components were shown, and recommendations for OPV operations were formulated.