Applying eye tracking as an alternative approach for activation of controls and functions in aircraft

Currently, controls in commercial aircraft flight decks are generally activated manually using a multitude of rotary knobs, levers, push-buttons, keyboards, etc. The complexity of modern flight decks and attempts in peak workload reduction drives research on alternative control technologies. Considerable research has been conducted by many agencies for the military regarding gaze tracking systems, speech recognizers, touch screens, gesture recognizers, lip recognizers, and other nonconventional controls. The application of such alternative strategies rather than manual activation of controls may improve human-machine interfaces in flight decks, and reduce the effort of interaction with systems when selecting the most situationally adapted control modality. The application of new control techniques may simplify operations in commercial flight decks by virtue of a reduction in the number of dedicated mechanical switches and control panels. This paper describes the development of a part task flight simulator that is currently under construction at the Center for Computer Aided Design at the University of Iowa. This simulator will be used to determine the merits of gaze based control activation combined with automatic speech recognition (ASR)