AIS-IFT: Intelligent Tutoring System for Helicopter Pilots

Customer	U.S Army and Army Research Institute Initial Entry Rotor Wing training school at Fort Rucker, AL
Need	Most of the flight simulators for flight training don’t have any tutoring facilities necessitating the presence of trainers to provide the instruction. The few automated tutors that do exist are too rigid in their tutoring strategies and do not adapt itself to the student. The Army is interested in intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) that can provide automated tutoring in a highly adaptive manner, taking into account the influence of personality, learning styles, and affect on flying and learning performance of a trainee, and providing targeted instruction. Such systems can provide the benefits of one-on-one tutoring without straining the resources of the course instructors.
Solution	Stottler Henke developed an Intelligent Tutoring System for initial flight training that goes beyond performance-based adaptations. It maintains an up-to-date, dynamic model of the student’s performance history, patterns of performance, personality traits, affective traits, and learning styles. The student model is used as a basis for diagnosing student errors and providing appropriate feedback and other remedial instruction. Instruction is adapted to suit each student’s learning style. AIS-IFT was developed using the FlexiTrainer authoring framework that enables rapid creation of flexible training strategies. The FlexiTrainer system is viewed as a collection of instructional agents whose actions can be specified visually as flow charts using the SimBionic intelligent agent toolkit. Each agent responds to a set of instructional goals when certain pre-conditions are met. The instructional planner coordinates these agents, selecting the optimal agent to satisfy a goal based on the pre-conditions, the tutor’s state, and the student model. Each agent’s behavior implements a set of instructional actions. The FlexiTrainer framework includes an authoring tool for specifying instructional behavior using a visual description mechanism.
Status	Version 1.0 of the AIS-IFT tutoring system was released in April 2004 and is available for evaluation and deployment.
Related Applications	This new technology will make it practical to incorporate adaptive instructional capabilities within a wide range of computer-based training and intelligent tutoring systems.
Additional information	Video demonstration (3 mins): Windows Media Video (14 MBytes) I/ITSEC 2004 conference paper: Intelligent Simulation-Based Tutor for Flight Training I/ITSEC 2002 conference paper: Developing an Intelligent Adaptive Flight Trainer