Abstract

The purpose of the air traffic management system is to accomplish the safe and efficient flow of air traffic. However, the primary goals of safety and efficiency are to some extent conflicting. In fact, to deliver a greater level of safety, separation between aircrafts would have to be greater than it currently is, but this would negatively impact the efficiency. In an attempt to avoid the trade- off between these goals, the long-range vision for the Single European Sky in- cludes objectives for operating as safely and efficiently in Visual Meteorological Conditions as in Instrument Meteorological Conditions. In this respect, a wide set of virtual/augmented reality tools has been developed and effectively used in both civil and military aviation for piloting and training purposes (e.g., Head-Up Displays, Enhanced Vision Systems, Synthetic Vision Systems, Combined Vi- sion Systems, etc.). These concepts could be transferred to air traffic control with a relatively low effort and substantial benefits for controllers’ situation aware- ness. Therefore, this study focuses on the see-through, head-tracked, head-up dis- play that may help controllers dealing with zero/low visibility conditions and in- creased traffic density at the airport. However, there are several open issues as- sociated with the use of this technology. One is the difficulty of obtaining a con- stant overlap between the scene-linked symbols and the background view based on the user’s viewpoint, which is known as ‘registration’. Another one is the presence of multiple, arbitrary oriented Head-Up Displays (HUDs) in the control tower, which further complicates the generation of the Augmented Reality (AR) content. In this paper, we propose a modified rendering pipeline for a HUD sys- tem that can be made out of several, arbitrary oriented, head-tracked, AR dis- plays. Our algorithm is capable of generating a constant and coherent overplay between the AR layer and the outside view from the control tower. However a 3D model of the airport and the airport’s surroundings is needed, which must be populated with all the necessary AR overlays (both static and dynamic). We plan to use this concept as a basis for further research in the field of see-through HUDs for the control tower. Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Abstract

a matter of fact, airports are considered as the bottleneck to increasing the capacity of the overall Air Traffic Management (ATM) system. While augmenting throughput in high performing airport operations, attention has rightly been placed on doing it in a safe manner. Many of the advances in airport operational safety come in the form of visualization tools for tower controllers. The increasing interest in Synthetic Vision (SV) and Augmented Reality (AR) technologies has led various analysts to positively esteem the adoption of new tools enabling both pilots and controllers to seamlessly operate under Visual Meteorological Conditions and Instrument Meteorological Conditions. This paper presents the motivations, the objectives, the proposed methodology and the expected impacts of the RETINA (Resilient Synthetic Vision for Advanced Control Tower Air Navigation Service Provision) project that has recently been granted by the SESAR (Single European Sky Air Traffic Management Research) Joint Undertaking. The two-years exploratory research project will investigate the potential and applicability of SV tools and Virtual/Augmented Reality (V/AR) display techniques for the Air Traffic Control (ATC) service provision by the airport control tower.