For manned aircraft, loss of control in flight (LOC-I) is one of the main causes of aviation fatalities; new technologies that help to reduce LOC-I thus have the potential to significantly reduce loss of life. This paper presents the development and initial testing of a joint human/automated (H/A) recovery system intended to assist the crew with recovery from upset conditions. The goal of the system is to keep pilots in the loop, leveraging their expertise while simultaneously conveying information about recovery procedures in an intuitive and unobtrusive manner. This research builds on recent work by the authors targeted at autonomous upset recovery for unmanned aerial vehicles. The authors have developed a number of crew-specific extensions to this automated system at both the architecture and interface levels. The resulting system optimizes recovery strategies offline, stores the recovery procedures in a compact manner that can easily be queried in real-time online, and communicates the procedure to the pilot through visual and haptic cues. The system was evaluated in a small-scale pilot-in-the-loop study. Three pilots with different backgrounds as well as different levels of experience were recruited to take part in the pilot-in-the-loop experiments. Metrics were defined to evaluate performance both in terms of quantitative recovery metrics (e.g. how fast did the vehicle recover nominal flight?) and crew experience (e.g. how does the use of the system affect workload?). The overall findings were: (1) following strategies provided by the joint H/A recovery system reduces both the time to recover and the amount of altitude lost during recovery, (2) following strategies provided by the joint H/A recovery system reduces the likelihood that the pilot will exceed structural limits, (3) following strategies provided by the joint H/A recovery system significantly reduces pilot workload.
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