A bilateral chair between ISAE – SupAéro (Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace) and Dassault Aviation, focused on the relationship between systems and humans and named CASAC, has been renewed for 3 years. This “cognitive air systems design and architecture” chair, started in 2016, helps the aircraft manufacturer design civil or military systems that facilitate piloting and mission management, in a complex and evolving regulatory context.

According to Bruno Stoufflet, Director of Innovation at Dassault Aviation, “The main topic for this chair is to take into account the evolution of certification, which requires better characterization and justification of concepts organizing the relationship between humans and systems. This in order to provide an optimized response. We must be able to ensure that pilots are able to make full use of the new systems, with the help of clear, simple and rapidly interpretable information, in order to achieve ever safer and more efficient civil and military air operations.

By what means? There are several:

Neuro-ergonomics aims to ensure greater efficiency of the operator/system pair by mobilizing knowledge of neuroscience, which concerns the study of cognitive and neural processes, as well as human factors that allow the adaptation of technologies to human capabilities and limitations.

The automation of certain functions is also a way to contribute to safer man/machine operations, provided that the human being remains the final decision-maker.

System engineering aims to integrate the previous means to take into account the different aspects of the collaboration between man and machine.

With Artificial Intelligence (AI), we have a tool that allows us to acquire real data on existing man/machine interactions, to analyze it and to design more reliable decision support or decision making systems.

The results are conclusive:

In 3 years, one of the subjects that has progressed well is related to eye tracking, which includes a set of techniques for recording eye movements

Bruno Stoufflet states that “It has been shown that this technique has sufficient precision to be used as a means of pilot/system interaction, whether for cockpit design, training and certification, or operations. Promising results and progress have been obtained, with work on metrics that characterize the human and the system at the behavioral level for example. For example, we can relate eye movements to the number of times the pilot must press a button or screen to consult a page or activate a function…. By analyzing pilot behavior in detail, we can determine the suitability of the cockpit concept and its implementation for the user.

Occulometry also has the capacity to “monitor” the pilot, to detect, among other things, that his behavior is deteriorating (fatigue, fascination, lack of perception, etc.), to monitor his control in relation to the mission entrusted to him, to alert him and to help him make decisions.

All these technological advances are regulated by the European Aviation Safety Agency, EASA, which ensures the safety and reliability of the methods it accepts for certification.

Bruno Stoufflet explains that “for military applications, neuro-ergonomics is used to improve piloting aids that would allow pilots to fly in the best possible conditions in a variety of situations: collaborative combat situations, high workloads, task distribution, etc. We could thus design a whole range of training aids to help pilots to improve their performance. We could thus conceive a whole virtual assistance component, with automation of certain systems, the search for good alarm modes understood by the pilot, who today is sometimes a victim of the “tunnel effect” and who, because of intense concentration, does not hear certain signals. We can also envisage providing assistance in understanding a tactical situation when faced with a multitude of simultaneous threats, thanks to the priority processing that AI-based algorithms can provide. The pilot must then be given interpreted information, clarified to the maximum and totally free of any ambiguity at the time of critical phases.

Cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence, big data, neuro-ergonomics and human-computer interaction techniques are key disciplines for understanding humans and facilitating their relationship with systems.

For Dassault Aviation, humans are irreplaceable for certain tactical decisions and will always intervene as a last resort. To illustrate this, the example is given of an unmanned combat aircraft. It can accomplish highly prepared missions with pre-identified ground targets, or analyze fixed data; but it is more difficult to imagine autonomous cooperative combat in a complex multi-actor environment.

With neuro-ergonomics and new human/machine interaction techniques, we can imagine being able to propose interesting functions in military activities to refine the understanding of situations, which we could have on Rafales in 4 to 5 years.

From an ethical point of view, as soon as we are in a context of recovering data linked to a person, the question arises of the person’s acceptance to deliver personal information. The anonymization of this data is one of the answers. However, it should be noted that the current trend is to accept more and more to provide these elements when it is demonstrated that they can benefit the end user who generated them.

The ISAE / Dassault Aviation CASAC Chair regularly reports on the progress of its research in scientific journal articles written by the researchers, and Dassault Aviation contributes to their communication.

In its bilateral relationship with Dassault Aviation, the Chair organizes an annual international conference, ICCAS (International Conference on Cognitive Aircraft Systems), whose 2022 edition will be held from June 1st to 2nd. This conference allows big international names to participate.

To conclude, the constant at Dassault Aviation is that the human being must remain in the loop, and we prefer to talk about assistance, with a system that can synthesize while guaranteeing complete control to crews, because it is the human being who makes the decision.

Jean-Louis Gueneau, coordinator of the scientific aspects of the Chair at Dassault Aviation, said: “Military aviation is very demanding because of the diversity and unpredictability of missions, which require complex tactical management. The challenge is to provide the human element with all the services needed to ensure this management responsibility. This is why we are working with ISAE-SUPAERO to identify the phenomena that will affect the performance of collaboration between crews and their machines. Nadia Didelot for AeroMorning