From Pilot Workload to Adverse Couplings: Understanding Human–Vehicle Interactions in Challenging Rotorcraft Operations

As civil and military aircraft evolve toward increasingly complex designs and intelligent systems, understanding pilot–vehicle interactions and their impact on safety and performance remains essential. Rotorcraft shipboard landing is among the most demanding flight operations, requiring pilots to contend with degraded and rapidly changing visual cues, deck motion, and environmental disturbances, often resulting in elevated workload. Yet, pilot workload is traditionally assessed using subjective rating scales that interrupt operations, provide only post-task measures, and offer limited insight into how pilot effort evolves during a mission. This seminar presents research on objective pilot workload assessment using signal processing of pilot inceptor activity, with helicopter shipboard landing serving as a representative high-workload task. The talk also examines adverse aircraft/rotorcraft–pilot couplings, including pilot-induced and pilot-assisted oscillations, which are difficult to predict, can arise from nonlinear pilot–vehicle interactions, and have the potential to compromise mission completion and flight safety. Methods for identifying and characterizing such coupling phenomena using pilot inceptor activity are discussed, together with their implications for aircraft dynamics and control, pilot assistance technologies, and autonomous aerial vehicles.

Speaker: Dr. Vinodhini Comandur

Biography:
Vinodhini Comandur is an Assistant Teaching Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. She completed her PhD in Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2025. Her research interests lie in flight dynamics and control, handling qualities, human factors engineering, and the development of autonomy-enabled capabilities for rotorcraft applications. She received her B.Tech. (Hons.) in Mechanical Engineering from the IIT Kharagpur in 2014, her M.Tech. in Aerospace Engineering from the IIT Kanpur in 2016, and her M.S. in Computational Science and Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2025.