360 Degree Top View inside a Helmet Mounted Display providing Obstacle Awareness for Helicopter Operations

Frequently, helicopter offshore missions are conducted in rough environments under adverse conditions. Specific operations, like hoisting close to a wind turbine or offshore platform landings, require special maneuvers and procedures in order to increase safety as much as possible. These two operations are quite challenging because helicopter pilots have to operate very close to obstacles like towers, cranes, turbine poles, and wings. The paper introduces a new approach supporting obstacle awareness all around a helicopter using a helmet mounted display (HMD). The obstacle awareness is provided by an orthogonal top view inset that is integrated in our standard HMD symbology. The paper comprises three different ways for the integration of the top view inset, the state of the art related to rotor strike alerting systems, pros and cons of the properties of exocentric orthogonal and egocentric perspective views as well as first impressions and results from a conceptual study