Evaluation of Haptic Shared Control and a Highway-in-the-Sky Display for Personal Aerial Vehicles

Highway-in-the-sky displays and haptic shared control could provide an easy-to-use control interface for non-expert pilots. In this paper, various display and haptic approaches are evaluated in a ight control task with a personal aerial vehicle. It is shown that a tunnel or a wall representation of the ight trajectory lead to best performance and lowest control activity and effort. Similar results are obtained when haptic guidance cues are based on the error of a predicted position of the vehicle with respect to the ight trajectory. Such haptic cues are also subjectively preferred by the pilots. This study indicates that the combination of a haptic shared control framework and highway-in-the-sky display can provide non-expert pilots with an easy-to-use control interface for ying a personal aerial vehicle