Increasing operator situational awareness during transition procedures for fixed-wing vtol UAV operations

Situational awareness towards system automation’s behavior in highly automated aircraft is a central requirement as a breakdown in the operator’s situational awareness can lead to critical situations and hazardous flight states. In the case of any system failures, the arising decision-making process with faults can be more complex and time critical, hence requires more attention and adequate information representation. This paper implements an operator interaction concept, concerning the Human-Machine-Interface (HMI) to increase situational awareness during transition and re-transition procedures of an unmanned experimental fixedwing VTOL aircraft. From a human operator point of view, requirements are placed towards the system automation’s state observability and proper feedback mechanisms for the state information are selected, comprising intuitive indications. The HMI and operator interaction concept are verified in a closed-loop simulation environment, so called Model-in-the-Loop (MIL), showing that the HMI functions are correctly implemented. For validation purposes, a real-time Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) environment is setup. The validation demonstrates that the proposed HMI and operator interaction concept can increase situational awareness during transition procedures for the experimental unmanned fixed-wing VTOL aircraft.