Acquisition of control skill with delayed and compensated displays

Area of Science:

• Human Factors Engineering
• Control Systems Engineering
• Aerospace Engineering

Background:

• Manual control tasks are crucial in many domains, including aviation and remote operation.
• Transport delays in the feedback loop significantly impact task performance and learning.
• Simulators are vital tools for training and research in complex control tasks.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the impact of transport delays on a two-axis compensatory manual control task.
• To evaluate the effectiveness of different delay compensation strategies.
• To quantify the learning curve under varying delay and compensation conditions.

Main Methods:

• Subjects performed a simulated aircraft attitude control task with an "inside-out" artificial horizon.
• Transport delays were introduced, ranging from those typical in training simulators.
• Factorial combination of delay magnitudes with first-order lead and lead/lag compensation functions was employed.

Main Results:

• No significant differences in control activity were observed once performance criteria were met.
• The number of trials required to achieve the performance criterion increased linearly with delay magnitude.
• The effectiveness of compensation strategies was evident in the reduced trials needed to meet the criterion.

Conclusions:

• Transport delays significantly increase the difficulty and learning time for manual control tasks.
• First-order lead and lead/lag compensations can effectively mitigate the negative effects of transport delays.
• Findings are applicable to aircraft control, vehicle simulation, remote manipulation, and graphical environment maneuvering.