Testing Touch Screens in Realistic Aeronautic Turbulent Conditions (Light to Severe)

As touch screens are everywhere in the consumer market Thales has launched in depth evaluations on their introduction in the cockpit. One of the challenges is to verify its compatibility with in flight use under turbulence conditions, including light, moderate and severe. In flight accelerometer collections were performed to provide us with a baseline for choosing between possible simulation solutions. Thales recognized early on the need for such a tool as it would enable us to define recommendations for our HMI designs. The objectives were first to validate specific complex touch/gestures using all the potential of touch interactions for novel cockpit Human Machine Interfaces and second to look into the various physical anchoring solutions capable of facilitating touch screens interactions in aeronautical turbulent environments. Given the 6 axis accelerometer profiles that were collected, only an hexapod structure was capable of reproducing those profiles with acceptable validity. This paper presents the works that enabled us to validate such an hexapod as a viable simulator for our tests and the development of an avionics platform for touch interactions under light to severe turbulences. Pilots were asked to evaluate 6 simulated profiles designed to mimic the “inflight” references. Tests were performed to validate the best profiles for each level of turbulence. The selected profiles were then used to evaluate our touch screen propositions in light, moderate and severe turbulent conditions. Preliminary results are presented.