DESIGN OF A HAPTIC STICK INTERFACE AS A PILOTS ASSISTANT IN A HIGH TURBULENCE TASK ENVIRONMENT

A study involving 8 Air Force pilots was conducted to examine the effi cacy of a force-reflecting joystick to improve performance during a si mulated landing task in wind turbulence. By adding certain force chara cteristics to a joystick, it was of interest to see if performance may change, different control effort may be utilized, and workload measur es may be altered based on the joystick utilized. The main results sho w that certain performance measures significantly improved by having t he force reflection condition on. The implications of this study are t hat in certain types of precision tracking tasks, subjected to externa l disturbances, the addition of the force characteristics to the joyst ick can significantly improve performance, result in less effort for c ontrol, and lower subjective workload.