Effects of Heave Washout Settings in Aircraft Pitch Disturbance Rejection

摘要

In most moving-base flight simulators, the simulated aircraft motion needs to be filtered with motion washoutnfilters to keep the simulator within its limited motion envelope. Translational motion in particular requires filtering,nas the low-frequency components of the vehicle motion tend to quickly drive simulators toward their motion bounds.nCommonly, linear washout filters are therefore used to attenuate the simulated motion in magnitude and in phase. Itnis found in many studies that the settings of these washout filters affect pilot performance and control behavior. Innmost of these studies, no comparison to a case with one-to-one motion cues is performed as a result of the limitednmotion envelope of the simulators used. In the current study, an experiment was performed in the SIMONAnResearch Simulator at the Delft University of Technology to investigate the effects of heave washout settings on pilotnperformance and control behavior in a pitch attitude control task. In addition to rotational pitch motion, heavenaccelerations at the pilot station that result directly from aircraft pitch were evaluated. This heave motion componentncould be supplied one-to-one in the simulator due to the modest size of the aircraft model, a Cessna Citation I businessnjet. The experiment revealed that pilot performance and control activity both increased significantly with increasingnheave motion fidelity. An analysis of pilot control behavior using pilot models indicated that the enhancednperformance was caused by an increase in the magnitude with which pilots responded to visual and physical motionnstimuli and a decrease in the amount of visual lead that was generated by the pilots.