Method and device for detecting absence of manual and automatic piloting of an aircraft

According to the invention, as a function of the altitude, the vertical speed and the heading of the aircraft, as well as of the deviation of the actual trajectory of the aircraft with respect to the automatic trajectory, a time interval (T) is determined, during which it is tolerable for said aircraft to be able to fly without any control command, both on the part of the stick and on that of said automatic pilot and an alert is emitted for the attention of the crew in the case where it is noted that the absences of manual piloting and of automatic piloting extend simultaneously over a duration at least equal to said time interval (T)

Flight experience and executive functions predict unlike professional pilots who are limited by the FAA's age rule, no age limit is defined in general aviation (GA)

Unlike professional pilots who are limited by the FAA's age rule, no age limit is defined in general aviation (GA). Some studies revealed significant aging issues on accident rates but these results are criticized. Our overall goal is to study how the effect of age on executive functions (EFs), high level cognitive abilities, impacts on the flying performance in GA pilots. This study relies on three components: EFs assessment, pilot characteristics (age, flight experience), and the navigation performance on a flight simulator. The results showed that contrary to age, reasoning, working memory (WM) and total flight experience were predictive of the flight performance. These results suggest that "cognitive age", derived in this study by the cognitive evaluation, is a better mean than "chronological age" consideration to predict the ability to pilot, in particular because of the inter-individual variability of aging impact and the beneficial effect of the flight experience

GHOST: experimenting countermeasures for conflicts in the pilot's activity

An approach for designing countermeasures to cure conflict in aircraft pilots’ activities is presented, both based on Artificial Intelligence and Human Factors concepts. The first step is to track the pilot’s activity, i.e. to reconstruct what he has actually done thanks to the flight parameters and reference models describing the mission and procedures. The second step is to detect conflict in the pilot’s activity, and this is linked to what really matters to the achievement of the mission. The third step is to design accu- rate countermeasures which are likely to do bet- ter than the existing onboard devices. The three steps are presented and supported by experimental results obtained from private and professional pi- lots

Authority Management and Conflict Solving in Human-Machine Systems

This paper focuses on vehicle-embedded decision autonomy and the human operator’s role in so-called autonomous systems. Autonomy control and authority sharing are discussed, and the possible effects of authority conflicts on the human operator’s cognition and situation awareness are highlighted. As an illustration, an experiment conducted at ISAE (the French Aeronautical and Space Institute) shows that the occurrence of a conflict leads to a perseveration behavior and attentional tunneling of the operator. Formal methods are discussed to infer such attentional impairment from the monitoring of physiological and behavioral measures and some results are given

How role assignment impacts decision-making in high-risk environments: Evidence from eye-tracking in aviation

Adequate monitoring of automated systems is an essential aspect of procedure compliance, protective behaviour, and appropriate decisions in ultra-safe environments. In the air transport industry, the distribution of roles in a flight crew – Pilot Flying vs. Pilot Monitoring – reflects the importance of this task. Little is known about how pilot role assignment impacts monitoring behaviour and subsequent decision-making. We designed a field study where 62 airline pilots equipped with portable eye-trackers had to make a dynamic decision during approach in the airline’s full-flight simulator. At a behavioural level, pilot role assignment (Pilot Flying vs. Pilot Monitoring) influenced decision time irrespective of rank (Captain vs. First Officer), with later decisions for the Pilot Monitoring. Eye-tracking results provided evidence that pilot role assignment rather than rank impacted fixations on choice-relevant information, with more fixations by the Pilot Monitoring. Overall, pilots’ fixations on choice-relevant information could predict decision-making. We discuss implications for the optimal combination of role assignment and hierarchical rank

Modélisation des conflits dans l'activité de pilotage

La revue d’incidents aéronautiques a montré que l’apparition de conflits dans la gestion du vol est un précurseur remarquable d’accidents. Ces conflits peuvent se produire entre les différents agents du système aérien (équipage, contrôle aérien, interface de pilotage). Nos premiers travaux ont consisté à proposer un modèle générique pour détecter les conflits entre agents. Ce modèle a ensuite été implémenté et testé dans des expérimentations avec des pilotes en simulateur de vol. Ces expériences ont permis de valider nos idées sur le conflit mais ont montré que les pilotes, lorsqu’ils sont confrontés à un conflit, ont tendance à perséverer et à s’enfermer dans la résolution du problème au détriment de la surveillance des paramètres vitaux. Pour étudier ce comportement, nous avons développé GHOST, environnement expérimental constitué d’un simulateur de vol connecté à une interface qui permet à un magicien d’Oz de créer des situations conflictuelles mais surtout d’envoyer des contre-mesures pour sortir le pilote de sa persévération. Ces contre-mesures reposent sur le principe d’un retrait ciblé de l’information : le cadran sur lequel se focalise le pilote disparaît puis est remplacé momentanément par un message pertinent en termes de sécurité. L’environnement GHOST a été testé avec 22 pilotes et les résultats semblent prouver l’efficacité de cette approche

Détection et résolution de conflits d'autorité dans un système homme-robot

Dans le cadre de missions réalisées conjointement par un agent artificiel et un agent humain, nous présentons un contrôleur de la dynamique de l'autorité, fondé sur un graphe de dépendances entre ressources contrôlables par les deux agents, dont l'objectif est d'adapter le comportement de l'agent artificiel ou de l'agent humain en cas de conflit d'autorité sur ces ressources. Nous définissons l'autorité relative de deux agents par rapport au contrôle d'une ressource, ainsi que la notion de conflit d'autorité : une première expérience nous montre en effet que le conflit constitue un déclencheur pertinent pour une redistribution de l'autorité entre agents. Une seconde expérience montre qu'au-delà de la modification du comportement de l'agent artificiel, il est effectivement possible d'adapter le comportement de l'opérateur humain en vue de résoudre un tel conflit

Impulsivity modulates pilot decision making under uncertainty

Little is known whether intensive training and a highly-procedural environment can alleviate the influence of personality on decision making. Here, we address this issue by investigating the influence of impulsivity as personality factor on decision making among airline pilots. We showed that impulsivity modulated pilots’ indecisiveness in uncertain decision scenarios as well as pilots’ self-reported compliance to airline guidelines in real life. This result suggests that the personality factor impulsivity is a profound trait that continues to have an influence through intensive training and highly-procedural decision situations

In silico vs. Over the Clouds: On-the-Fly Mental State Estimation of Aircraft Pilots, Using a Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy Based Passive-BCI

There is growing interest for implementing tools to monitor cognitive performance in naturalistic work and everyday life settings. The emerging field of research, known as neuroergonomics, promotes the use of wearable and portable brain monitoring sensors such as functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to investigate cortical activity in a variety of human tasks out of the laboratory. The objective of this study was to implement an on-line passive fNIRS-based brain computer interface to discriminate two levels of working memory load during highly ecological aircraft piloting tasks. Twenty eight recruited pilots were equally split into two groups (flight simulator vs. real aircraft). In both cases, identical approaches and experimental stimuli were used (serial memorization task, consisting in repeating series of pre-recorded air traffic control instructions, easy vs. hard). The results show pilots in the real flight condition committed more errors and had higher anterior prefrontal cortex activation than pilots in the simulator, when completing cognitively demanding tasks. Nevertheless, evaluation of single trial working memory load classification showed high accuracy (>76%) across both experimental conditions. The contributions here are two-fold. First, we demonstrate the feasibility of passively monitoring cognitive load in a realistic and complex situation (live piloting of an aircraft). In addition, the differences in performance and brain activity between the two experimental conditions underscore the need for ecologically-valid investigations

Towards human operator “state” assessment

This paper focuses on an approach to estimate the symbolic “state” and detect the attentional tunneling of a human operator in the frame of a human-robot mission. The symbolic “state” results from a fuzzy aggregation of the operator's gaze position and heart rate