Human-Machine Interaction Laboratory (HMILAB)

Overview

The Human-Machine Interaction Laboratory is housed in room 0.37, on the gound floor. It is a small but versatile lab, which can be used as a fixed base simulator for either cars or aircraft, or as the platform for  experiments with control tasks or visual perception research. The screens and devices in the lab are controlled by up to 7 computers, linked together in a high-speed ethernet network. The lab is split up into an observation room and an experiment room, normally the experimenter is working from the observation room, controlling the simulation, and subjects are flying or driving the simulation from the experiment room.

Equipment

The "aircraft side" of the simulation features:

  • A fully adjustable aircraft seat, from a Breguet Atlantique, installed on the right-hand side.
  • A control-loaded hydraulic side stick, with ± 30º excursion in roll and ± 22º excursion in pitch.
  • A set of control-loaded hydraulic rudder pedals (from a Fokker F27), with brake pedals loaded by a passive spring.
  • Controls on the pedestal; two throttle levers, flap lever and a speedbrake lever.
  • A 3-position gear handle with associated gear lights.
  • Two 18" LDC panels for the instrument displays, one installed in portrait mode, both displays with a 1280x1024 pixel resolution.

 

Engine Instruments 

 

Side stick aircraft side 

 



The "car side" of the laboratory features:

  • A control-loaded steering wheel (FCS) with a NISSAN wheel
  • A Control loaded accelerator pedal.
  • A passive spring loaded brake pedal.
  • A luxury car seat (NISSAN).
  • A 12" LCD panel for the instrument displays, with an 800x600 pixel resolution.

 

 

Gas pedal with force feedback

 

 

Outside visual for driving

 



Both sides share a unique outside visual projection system. That system is driven off one quad-core PC, with two dual head graphics cards driving a total of 4 LCD projectors. The projectors use the front wall and the two side walls of the laboratory as projection screens, and covers a field of view of almost 180º, providing a truly immersive experience.

 

Layout of the projection in the laboratory; 4 projectors cover almost 180 degrees field-of-view.

 



 

Infrastructure

Both for experiments with car driving and for experiments with flying it is possible to use our portable FaceLab system for experiments with eye tracking. The lab is driven by a stack of 5 PC's, running openSUSE Linux with an adapted kernel with the PREEMPT_RT patch, making these systems real-time, with arbitrary precision timing. The communication with various devices in the lab is handled by two PC's with QNX and analog and digital IO cards. All PC's are equipped with DUECA, a middleware layer that enables easy implementation of real-time experiment programs.

 

For students and staff working with the laboratory, there are details on the use of the laboratory, and on the software installed on the different computers available in the C&S Wiki pages.

 

 

© 2012 TU Delft

Metamenu