Motion cues help pilots steer their airplane. For his PhD research Peter Zaal investigated how important these cues are, in order to then fine-tune simulators.
Imagine being a passenger on an airplane and going to the cockpit, only to discover that the pilot has blinders on and therefore cannot look outside. What’s more, every manoeuvre the pilot tries to make is seriously hampered by a guy sitting behind him. No wonder the airplane is rocking back and forth all the time. Wait until the aviation authorities hear about that!
This set up was part of the research conducted by (soon to be Dr) Peter Zaal (AE). As part of his research, a fly-by-wire system was installed in the TU Delft research airplane (Cessna Citation), with which Zaal could add disturbance signals to the pilot control signals. “It took me a long time to get permission from the authorities to do these experiments,” he says, laughing.
Zaal’s PhD research (which he will defend this week) focused on the importance of motion cues for pilots and the discrepancy in pilot behaviour between real and simulated flight.
A problem with flight simulators is that they can only generate limited physical motion stimuli, owing to the very limited amount of space in which they function. To find out to what degree these limited motion cues affect pilot behaviour and to improve the simulator, Zaal asked seven pilots to perform very well-defined flight acrobatics in the air, and then on the ground, in a simulator at the faculty of Aerospace Engineering. The tasks were pre-programmed and the pilots had to follow a line on their screen as accurately as possible.
Zaal registered all manoeuvres and compared them. The reaction time of the pilots was much lower in the simulator without motion, and the pilots had more difficulties keeping their plane on track. However, by changing the way the simulator moves (more or less abruptly, for instance), Zaal could influence the way the pilots behaved. He could make them manoeuvre more similar to the way they did when actually in the air. In other words, he could more or less fine-tune and calibrate the simulator.
“I didn’t really calibrate the simulator, because I focussed only on cues related to ascending and descending movements and not on cues related to roll,” Zaal says. “But calibrating the simulator certainly is possible and will probably be done once a colleague of mine has done similar experiments with more motion conditions.”
You certainly don’t want to be in the Cessna when those experiments are done.
Nanogaatje
Altijd al gewild dat je genoom voor een prikkie werd uitgelezen? Dankzij nieuwe robuuste nanogaatjes kan die droom werkelijkheid worden. Dit stelt prof.dr. Cees Dekker van de afdeling bionanosciene (Technische Natuurwetenschappen) vrij vertaald in een persbericht. Zijn postdoc Adam Hall beschrijft deze week in Nature Nanotechnology hoe hij een nieuw, veel robuuster type nanogaatje maakte in een siliciumchip waar enkelstrengs DNA door getrokken kan worden om uitgelezen te worden. De onderzoeker wist speciale porievormende eiwitten in een membraam van siliciumnitride te plaatsen.
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