A Study of Human-Machine Teaming For Single Pilot Operation with Augmented Reality

With the increasing number of flights in the recent years, airlines and aircraft manufacturers are facing a daunting problem: shortage of pilots. One solution to this is to reduce the number of pilots in the aircraft and move towards single pilot operations (SPO). However, with this approach, the safety and quality of the flights must be guaranteed. Due to the complex nature of piloting task, a form of human-machine teaming is required to provide extra help and insight to the pilot. To this end, it is natural to look for proper artificial intelligence (AI) solutions as the field has evolved rapidly through the past decades with rise of machine learning and deep learning. The ideal AI for this task should aim to improve the human decision-making and focus on interaction with human rather than simply automating processes without human intervention. This particular field of AI is designed to communicate with the human and is known as cognitive computing (CC). To this end, several technologies can be employed to cover different aspects of interaction. One such technology is augmented reality (AR) which as of today, has matured enough to be used in commercial products. As such, an experiment was conducted to study the interaction between the pilot and CC teammate, and understand whether assistance is required to enable safe transition towards SPO.