An active side stick controller for aircraft ground operations

Abstract

Currently, pilots need to use multiple controls to manoeuver large commercial aircraft on the ground, including the tiller, throttle levers and brake pedals. This paper proposes an alternative method of taxiing which replaces these controls with a single control while providing feedback to the pilots – an active side stick. Five different active side stick control strategies are defined for direction and speed control during taxiing. A fuzzy logic controller is designed for speed control and force feedback is provided to the user according to the cross-track error. Preliminary results show that the fuzzy logic controller performs as expected. Furthermore, the results of a human-in-the-loop experiment based on two of the control strategies demonstrate the suitability of an active side stick for taxi operations. The results also show that the use of force feedback can help the pilot to reduce cross-track error, while the impact of a ‘speed hold’ feature on cross-track error needs to be investigated further.