Aircraft loss-of-control in the form of unfavorable aircraft–pilot coupling is a key ongoing safety problem for aviation. This study develops a new active inceptor to mitigate the loss-of-control caused by pilot-induced oscillation. The distinction from existing haptic interfaces is that the spring stiffness of this active inceptor changes with the system error between ideal linear system response and actual manual control system response, thus it can guide and inform the human pilot to change the control behavior. Furthermore, a pilot workload evaluation metric is proposed to evaluate the active inceptor from the perspective of pilot's perception. A feedback signal of the rate tracking loop is used to measure the difficulty of the flight task. The spectral peak of the feedback signal versus both frequency and time is introduced to describe the time-varying pilot workload. Combined with the scalogram-based pilot-induced oscillation metric, different configurations and parameters characteristics of the active inceptor are designed. The simulation results show that the single-gradient configuration and the stiffness k = 800 of the active inceptor can mitigate the loss-of-control effectively. The designed active inceptor can be used for improving flying qualities and alleviating the loss-of-control events in the form of adverse aircraft–pilot coupling.
Design of Aircraft Active Inceptor Based on Pilot Comprehensive Evaluation
IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine ; 40 , 5 ; 28-39
2025-05-01
4664750 byte
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
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