Studying Pilot’s Control Actions in the Multichannel Control Task

Аuthors

Efremov A. V.^*, Prodanik V. A.^**

Moscow Aviation Institute (National Research University), 4, Volokolamskoe shosse, Moscow, А-80, GSP-3, 125993, Russia

*e-mail: pvl@mai.ru
**e-mail: vprodanik@mail.ru

Abstract

When accomplishing a number of piloting tasks, the pilot simultaneously puts into effect control through several channels. Thus, for example, when the pitch angle in the longitudinal channel is being changed by the control stick deflecting in the longitudinal channel, the pilot changes as well the position of the throttle lever to sustain the airspeed. The same is with the lateral channel, when rolling creation the pilot deflects the pedals to eliminate the emerging gliding angle.
Notwithstanding the studies in the field of the pilot’s control actions for about 80 years, only singular works, accomplished in 70-80s of the last century deal with studying pilot’s behavior and an aircraft-pilot system characteristics in the tasks of the multichannel control. Modern aircraft dynamic characteristics analysis reveals significant interrelation between control channels is being observed in many of them. These are, in the first place, the cross coupling in the longitudinal and lateral channels at the large angles of attack, cross-couplings between the roll and yaw control channels of the space shuttle as well as cross-couplings between control channels of a helicopter in the hovering mode.
Control in several channels, especially at strongly outspoken cross couplings, increases the pilot workload and consequently may lead to his erroneous actions and the flight safety degradation. Knowing the pilots behavior regularities in these tasks is thereupon of utter importance.
This article presents the studies of the pilot's control actions in the multichannel control task. The authors considered a method for the pilot's describing functions identification in the task of the two-channel control with the frequency characteristics interpolation on the common frequency range. Experimental studies by both mathematical and semi-natural modeling on the ground-based station are performed. Control channels independence provision condition is obtained, and the cross coupling dynamics impact on its accomplishing is studied. The authors proposed a regulator based on the inversed dynamics principle, allowing the piloting safety enhancing.
The research accomplished in this work on the control task in the two channels of the pilot-aircraft system revealed:
• the ability of the components of the of pilot’s describing functions matrix measuring by introducing polyharmonic input signals with the different set of frequencies, and performing the procedure of intermediate measurement results interpolation on the common frequency range;
• the pilot's ability to perform control channels “decoupling”, depending on the aircraft dynamics in crossed circuits;
• effectiveness of the regulator based on the principle of the inversed dynamics principle, which allows the control channels “decoupling”, as well as significantly simplifying the tracking task in each channel.

Keywords:

“aircraft-pilot” system, flight safety, multichannel control task, cross-coupling, inverse dynamics

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