The following is an excerpt from The Robot in the Simulator: Artificial Intelligence in Aviation Training, a new book by veteran aviation journalist Rick Adams, FRAeS. Available from AviationVoices.com – special 40% WATS discount. (https://aviationvoices.com/shop/)
A Clint Eastwood movie 40 years ago, Firefox, focuses on a prototype Russian fighter jet which Eastwood’s character, Major Mitchell Gant USAF (Retired), attempts to steal. The Mach 5 stealth aircraft features a weapons system with a neuralink to the pilot’s brain, able to read the pilot’s thoughts and enable him to aim and fire missiles, guns and flares without pressing a button… a 3-second reaction advantage over any air-to-air foe.
Researchers at ISAE-SUPAERO, led by Dr. Frederic Dehais, are attempting to develop something similar to the fictional Firefox: design a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) which synchronizes a ‘smart cockpit’ with a pilot’s brainwaves, allowing the aircraft and the pilot to share the workload, so to speak. While the pilot focuses on certain flight management tasks, the aircraft essentially takes over other tasks.
“What we’d like to have is cockpits that we can operate with the brain in a hands-free fashion,” said Dehais. “The cockpit can sense your cognitive state.”
With modern jet fighter aircraft there is so much computation “they say we reach a limit at some point.” The cockpit cannot accommodate any more switches, buttons or combination of buttons. So instead, can cockpit designers tap into the brain?
“We did an aircraft implementation using brainwaves,” explained Dehais. Wearing a ‘skull cap’ wired to read EEG (electroencephalogram) electrical activity in the brain, “the pilot set the flaps, turned on the landing lights and lowered the landing gear – just using brainwaves.”
“On the modern airline flight deck, when you want to activate the autoflight system, you have to press the ‘autopilot on’ button. [In our system] the pilot will just think about autopilot, and there we go.”
Dehais’s team did another simulator experiment to monitor the pilot’s attention. “We had anti-collision radar and when the aircraft was in the middle center of the screen, the pilot was supposed to perform an anti-collision maneuver. The system was monitoring how much attention the pilot paid to the task. But the pilot was focusing elsewhere. So the system detected that the pilot missed awareness of the collision, triggered a warning, and the adaptive automation performed the maneuver to avoid the collision.”
ISAE-SUPAERO (Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace) is the world’s first dedicated institute of aerospace engineering, located in Toulouse, France. Dehais is one of eight ISAE-SUPAERO teacher-researchers in the shortlist of the world’s most influential scientists. In 2019 he and his team won the Aviation Week Commercial Aviation Safety Laureate for the laboratory’s work in speeding up progress in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of a pilot’s brain to improve air safety.
He is also the first AXA Chair in Neuroergonomics for Flight Safety, assembling experts in neuroscience, signal processing, and computer science to use brain imaging techniques and develop algorithms to analyze – in operational situations, such as flying an airplane – brain activity related to attention and decision making.
“I wanted to be a pilot when I was a kid,” mused Dehais. “The first time I heard a Supermarine Spitfire, I fell in love with aviation. The sound of the Merlin engine really touched me. For some reason, I never became a pilot. But at the same time, since I was a kid, I was very interested in biology and neuroscience and so on. I managed to merge these two disciplines together.”
‘Firefox’ concept by Matthew Teevan
https://matteline.artstation.com/