Active and passive side stick controllers in manual aircraft control

A two-axis electrohydraulic servo-controlled side stick was used to study the manual control of aircraft with advanced control systems. The applied stick force can be made independent of the stick position. In case of an active side stick the applied stick force is used as the control signal to the aircraft, and aircraft state variables such as pitch and roll attitude or rate can be fed back to the stick position. With the passive side stick, the servosystem, as the control loading system of a flight simulator, simulates the dynamic characteristics of a mechanical mass-spring-damper control system. An experiment in which the influence of passive and active side sticks on manual control was compared under a wide variety of experimental conditions in a moving-base flight simulator is described. The simulator is described. The results show that the active side stick helps the subject improve tracking performance in both a disturbance task and a target-following task. The addition of motion cues improved tracking performance independently of the side stick characteristics and tracking task