H/OZ: PFD and Collaborative Flight Control System, Phase I

With aircraft automation increasingly able to control flight autonomously, situational awareness and engagement of the crew can suffer. To improve aviation safety further we need new paradigms to balance between exploiting increasingly powerful technologies and retaining and promoting aeronautical decision making (ADM) by the crew. This proposal explores integrating H-mode, a flight control system developed by researchers at the NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) that shares workload with pilots to leverage the unique capabilities of human pilots and automated control systems, with OZ, a primary flight display system under development at eSky. OZ provides a single-screen display for IMC flight, mapping external objects such as airports, waypoints, air traffic, weather etc. onto the primary flight display. The hybrid system (H/OZ) will allow the pilot both to retain situational awareness and to monitor the flight and select alternative actions at critical points. H/OZ will marry the superior situational awareness capability of OZ with the superior cooperative flight control of H-mode. In phase 1, eSky will develop a design for H/OZ and explore the feasibility of key new design elements. eSky will map the user interface of H-mode into the OZ display and add functionality to both. In collaboration with LaRC, the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition and the University of Maryland, eSky will identify specific areas critical to the performance of H/OZ and use rapid prototyping to evaluate the usability of the new design elements. New OZ functionality will be evaluated using an eSky OZ laptop simulator. H-mode prototyping will be done in the NASA LaRC H-mode simulator. Feasibility will be tested by demonstrating that the OZ display metaphor supports full H-mode functionality without compromising the usability of the H-mode user interface. Phase 2 will focus on creating an H/OZ simulator and on usability and performance testing.

This is a mature technology (TRL 7+) — the realistic path in is usually NASA's Technology Transfer Program: licensing an existing NASA patent, or a Space Act Agreement to use NASA facilities/expertise directly. NASA also runs a startup licensing program with no upfront fee for companies formed to commercialize a specific NASA technology.

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