IMPROVING SITUATIONAL AWARENESS AND QUALITY OF SERVICE USING 3-DIMENSIONAL AUDIO WARNING SYSTEM (3-DAWS)

摘要

It has been said that "the purpose of the ears is to point the eyes". Over the last few years one of the most promising advances for Human Machine Interfaces (HMI) has been the development of 3-Dimensional Audio Warning System (3-DAWS) leading to improved Situ-ational Awareness (SA) and Quality of Service (QoS). The existing warning audio tones/messages used in IAF aircraft are presently in the audio frequency range of 350 Hz-4 KHz which may still facilitate spatial sound separation in azimuth but difficult to discern in elevation. A set of experiments were conducted using SLAB tool to check the efficacy of the 3-DA WS system and the improvements it offered. With encouraging results in terms of better perception to spatial separation, it is recommended to integrate 3-DAWS in fighter aircraft of IAF. A generalised architecture is also proposed in this paper.