Development of Haptic Assistance for Route Assessment Tool of NASA NextGen Cockpit Situation Display.

The NextGen Cockpit Situation Display (CSD), developed by NASA Ames's Flight Deck Display Laboratory, provides advanced flight control functionalities and traffic/weather displays to pilots [1]. Traditionally, the user operates with the CSD using a computer mouse and receives only visual feedback about the controlling actions. In this work, we integrate force feedback in the Route Assessment Tools of the CSD, where the user can manage the flight plan to resolve conflicts in real-time. A spring force, with a variable stiffness coefficient, was used to model the force feedback with its strength varying proportionally to the overall path length. Force display was provided as an indicator of the effort required to deviate from the optimal path to assist the user in decision making. The force feedback models were evaluated on a software testbed created on Microsoft Foundation Class with the Novint Falcon haptic-feedback input device.