Today is the beginning of Spring Semester in 2010. My first class is ESD 744: Human Supervisory Control, one of courses that I take a huge step away from my core courses, stretching the area I could learn. Interestedly, knowledge is quite universal. A lot of thinking here are quite supporting with management decision and reshape my mind on design and system thinking!
From 40s plane to nowadays cool design airplane, you will find a lot changes in cockpit for pilot. from totally manual to glass screen automation, the change is supposed to get better and easy for pilot to make quick decision during emergency, but getting better sometimes in design will become to take in some "sounds cool" ideas, which are potential problems for real time flight. From when we allow our life to fill with cool things, some actually purely pleasure without proving functionality. For pleasure, that is fun, but for airplane, what you will put in front of pilot, will you recommend those cool thing?
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles have been quite demanded. Imagine that there will be fed-ex airplanes without pilot, for sure our shipping fee is low. But when I learned why company so expects unmanned aerial plane, apparently, the pension for pilot has been considered a quite budget on their yearly financial spending. So, will the trend be less pilot, but more ground support? I wonder. "Training" has not been quite friendly considered in flight industry, as how you can define your training manual in the threatening situation of pilot safety. The computer's calculation is a conditional result, how can we avoid the error by introducing training steps, blocking human decision at critical situations? As I ask myself many questions, the new perspectives to system, safety, human fact errors are changing.
What could be sounds cool but also make sense changes?? I really like the unmanned coal mined vehicle, reduced the possibilities of loosing innocent lives. "Dead-man switch" at train, makes you consider how much automation we would like the drivers to do. For sure, the automobile with sensor(night vision) screen at dashboard will not be my choice, as it draw your focus and lead you ignore the surrounding with your usual common sense.
Sheridan’s Span of Control is from manual control, to supervisory control to automated control. Where should we draw the lines among these? Will you let astronaut rest with one red button having full automation control, or will you let them busy work through everything in the space having manual control? too bad, two days ago, the funding for going to Mars plan got canceled, significant group of MIT studies have to seek other opinions. Not too long ago, they were still discussing those controls...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_x5IziyOcAg&feature=player_embedded#
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77-7EM38MSw
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment