Dassault Aviation and ISAE-SUPAERO renew their collaboration on the CASAC chair

WORK AIMED AT OPTIMIZING HUMAN-MACHINE INTERACTION

This chair, whose main research areas are neuroergonomics, decision-making autonomy of automated systems and systems engineering, aims to study various aspects of collaboration between man and machine.
The challenge is to make civil and military air operations safer, more robust and more efficient, while guaranteeing complete control to crews. The systems under consideration are often operated in complex situations; they therefore have advanced automation to carry out their missions more autonomously, always under human control, based on decision-making algorithms from the field of artificial intelligence.
At ISAE-SUPAERO, it is the DCAS that has this expertise in neuroergonomics and artificial intelligence for system control.

First conclusive results

The Chair’s research on Human-Computer Interaction, conducted from 2016 to 2021, has led to the development of various physiological measurement tools, as well as machine learning and automated action planning techniques. In particular, the teams have worked on developing active or passive assistance functions to help pilots and operators improve their performance.
For this, “Pilot Monitoring” was the initial focus of work in order to better understand the activity of the crew. Experiments on simulators using behavioral and physiological measurement tools were carried out to determine metrics capable of evaluating the operator’s performance, and his level of commitment or stress.

Dassault Aviation plans to integrate such functions on its civil and military aircraft in the next decade.

The machine, the operators’ teammate

“The main focus of this chair is the development of innovative technologies that help, on the one hand, to qualify the interaction between the human and the machine in order to know if the cooperation is effective and, on the other hand, to automatically decide what should be maintained, suggested or changed to promote the team’s performance,” explains Caroline Chanel, head of the chair at ISAE-SUPAERO.

To do this, quantitative behavioral and physiological metrics will be merged with more qualitative metrics in order to evaluate the efficiency of the Man-Machine cooperation. This efficiency measurement will then be exploited by algorithms from the field of artificial intelligence to adapt and reinforce this cooperation.
These innovative subjects are of interest to industrialists and researchers in the perspective of concrete applications in the longer term.