Abstract
The advancements of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft have rapidly increased in the past few years and there are working prototypes with human pilots already tested. With the current state of progress, provided the battery technology and automation level catches up to the required standard, VTOL cars could come to the market soon. But the regulatory bodies are still working on the policies of automated cars and far from their end goals. Given the scenario, it would be extremely beneficial to have empirical data to inform the engineers, designers, and policymakers what could be an intuitive controller from the existing hardware widely available in the market. This study investigates the ease-of-use of flying a VTOL aircraft between three of the most widely used controllers, namely the driving wheelset, drone radio controller and joystick, backed up by performance data, EEG data, and NASA-TLX survey.
A case study was conducted for 30 participants with a G2/G license within the age range of 18 to 64 years. Each participant tried all three controllers in randomized order to fly through a standard track in Virtual Reality (VR). Performance data and EEG signals were recorded in real-time, and NASA-TLX survey was conducted after the user tried each controller. After they tried all three controllers, an overall survey was given to rank the controllers from the most preferred to the least preferred, and to reason their choices. Finally, the users were asked to fly through the track with the driving wheelset one more time, where randomized wind was introduced to see if that can affect their performance and overall workload.
The results of the experiment are compared among the three controllers using the three different types of datasets.
Presenter
Azwad Abid, MASc candidate in Systems Design Engineering
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