Developing an Embedded Method to Recognize Human Pilot Intentions In an Intelligent Cockpit Aids for the Pilot Decision Support System

Several recent aircraft accidents occurred due to goal conflicts between human and machine actors. To facilitate the management of the cockpit activities considering these observations. a computational aid. the Agenda Manager (AM) has been developed for use in simulated cockpit environments. It is important to know pilot intentions performing cockpit operations accurately to improve AM performance. Without accurate knowledge of pilot goals or intentions, the information from AM may lead to the wrong direction to the pilot who is using the information. To provide a reliable flight simulation environment regarding goal conflicts. a pilot goal communication method (GCM) was developed to facilitate accurate recognition of pilot goals. Embedded within AM, the GCM was used to recognize pilot goals and to declare them to the AM. Two approaches to the recognition of pilots goals were considered: (1) The use of an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system to recognize overtly or explicitly declared pilot goals. and (2) inference of covertly or implicitly declared pilot goals via the use of an intent inferencing mechanism. The integrated mode of these two methods could overcome the covert goal mis-understanding by use of overt GCM. And also could it overcome workload concern with overt mode by the use of covert GCM. Through simulated flight environment experimentation with real pilot subjects, the proposed GCM has demonstrated its capability to recognize pilot intentions with a certain degree of accuracy and to handle incorrectly declared goals. and was validated in terms of subjective workload and pilot flight control performance. The GCM communicating pilot goals were implemented within the AM to provide a rich environment for the study of human-machine interactions in the supervisory control of complex dynamic systems.