A Review of Low-Cost Collision Alerting Systems and their Human-Machine Interfaces

Abstract

Mid-air collisions still are a regular cause of accidents in parts of the aviation community.  Yet advances in the miniaturization and the declining cost of electronics and microprocessors over the past decade have spawned several collision alerting systems specifically tailored to the needs and constraints of sports aviation. In this paper, the current state of technology in low-cost collision alerting systems in this branch of aviation is briefly reviewed.  The FLARM system is one of several systems in widespread use today.  Due to its low cost and widespread proliferation within the gliding community, this system is discussed in more detail. Here it is identified that most developments associated with the FLARM system are either hardware-related or pertaining to the development of flight-phase identification and traffic-conflict detection algorithms.  According to available literature, the human-machine interfaces (HMIs) of FLARM and other low-cost collision alerting systems are designed pragmatically.  No insight into the requirements and the design of HMIs of low-cost collision alerting systems is found in literature.  Based on this fact, several questions pertaining to HMI design are formulated. As a result, a study of commercially available HMI devices was performed, revealing several HMI categories and potential problems on HMI usability.  The paper concludes in stating that experimental analysis is required to properly gauge HMI efficacy for different piloting tasks in sport aviation.