Integrated control and display augmentation for manual remote flight control in the presence of large latency

Large latency in the communication channel presents a huge challenge to effectively remote control the aircraft manually. This paper proposes an approach to alleviate the adverse effect of time delay using control and display augmentation, aiming to improve remote control performance and reduce pilot’s workload. Modest level of automation is necessary for the mission success, the onboard controller admits straightforward influence on the flight path. A reference model based control architecture was employed, the reference model not only acts as the desired dynamics for the onboard controller to track, the same reference model was also used on the ground, giving the pilot undelayed indication of the control command through Head Up Display. Synthetic vision is another feature of the visual system, providing the freedom of feeding aircraft states from nonlinear model based prediction to the pilot. This prediction serves for the purpose including: compensates the downlink delay, bridging data gap due to low update rate, synchronizing ground and on board reference models. Pilot in the loop flight test results showed improvement in the tracking performance with the proposed augmentation.