• compensatory tracking task
• haptic force feedback
• pilot training

The aim of this work is to investigate the influence of haptic force feedback for training inexperienced pilots in a compensatory tracking task. In this study the dynamics of a small aircraft is considered. First a 1-DoF haptic force feedback is designed for roll dynamics and tested in a humanin-the-loop experiment. Afterwards the study and the design of the force feedback is extended to learn a 2-DoF compensatory tracking task. According to previous study [ref], benefits of haptic feedback have been found in more complex manual control task. Thus, the aircraft dynamics is extended in two axes in order to obtain a more difficult dynamics to control. Here, pitch and roll dynamics of a small aircraft are considered. In this second study, an identification procedure is first applied to evaluate pilot’s behavior and estimate the corresponding transfer function, then a haptic force feedback is designed for pitch and roll dynamics. The designed feedbacks, for both the 1-DoF and 2-DoF cases, are finally tested in human-in-the-loop experiments to evaluate whether haptic force feedback can help human operators learn faster the task, compared to manual control. Both the experiments have been performed on fixed-base simulators. A single-loop compensatory tracking task experiment has been conducted at University of Pisa. A group of participants has been tested with haptic aid and another group has performed the task with manual control. A 2-DoF compensatory tracking task experiment has been conducted at Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Germany. Again, haptic feedback has been compared to manual control. Participants performance are measured and compared in terms of MSE (Mean Squared Error) and RMSE (Root MSE).