Pilots in India are testing aircraft display systems that work by tracking and responding to eye movements and could let military pilots keep their hands on the plane鈥檚 controls more often while flying.
Modern聽aircraft have electronic display systems that show information such as the 鈥檚 fuel level, imaging system or geographical position. Pilots can click the screen to the relevant page of information as needed, but this requires taking one hand either off the plane鈥檚 throttle or control stick.
鈥淲hen you are flying at different phases, you do not need all this information at the same time,鈥� says Pradipta Biswas at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. He and his colleagues have devised an eye-tracking system that is embedded into a cockpit computer and that allows a to choose the relevant display simply by looking at it and then confirming their selection by pressing a button on the control stick.
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In a simulator, the system halved the amount of time it took to complete the action, says Biswas. Nine participants tested the system and completed a total of just under 600 look-and-select tasks.
The team has also devised a second eye-tracking system that is worn on a pilot鈥檚 head and responds to their head and eye movements. The researchers tested the system in a simulator and tasked participants with focusing on a button at the centre of the simulated plane windscreen, which they could select by looking at it.
In a military setting, the head-mounted system could be used to automatically display information about a target in the distance if a pilot focuses their eyes on it, says Biswas.
controls aren鈥檛 currently in use in commercial , and the researchers first assessed whether they could accurately be implemented. They used commercially available eye-tracking glasses to follow the eye moments of three Indian Air Force pilots as each flew a transport aircraft and performed standard selection tasks. The average response time for each task was 2 seconds, just under half the time it usually takes without the glasses.
The researchers also tested how accurate eye tracking would be at different g-forces, as military planes can reach speeds that can result in g-forces several times the gravity on Earth鈥檚 surface. A pilot flew a BAE Systems Hawk aircraft at forces of -1, 1, 3 and 5 g 鈥� the average person might pass out under forces of about 5 g. When pilots looked at a target, the eye-tracking devices were accurate to four degrees of the angle of vision around the target up to 3 g, but at 5 g the accuracy dropped, widening the area the device tracked to 9.5 degrees around the target.
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