Design of a Haptic Stick Interface as a Pilot's Assistant in a High Turbulence Task Environment

A study involving 8 Air Force pilots was conducted to examine the efficacy of a force-reflecting joystick to improve performance during a simulated landing task in wind turbulence. By adding certain force characteristics to a joystick, it was of interest to see if performance may change, different control effort may be utilized, and workload measures may be altered based on the joystick utilized. The main results show that certain performance measures significantly improved by having the force reflection condition on. The implications of this study are that in certain types of precision tracking tasks, subjected to external disturbances, the addition of the force characteristics to the joystick can significantly improve performance, result in less effort for control, and lower subjective workload.