Manual control of a flexible arm and its application to an automatic control system

The experimental positioning of a flexible arm by a human operator is described. The flexible arm is characterized by nonlinearity and infinite degrees of freedom. The human operator interprets a given task and finds a procedure for the operation, devising an effective way of achieving the goal, based on his or her experience and knowledge about the task. The question of how these results can be modeled and applied to automatic control systems is considered, and the use of a reference input filter is proposed. The filter gives a satisfactory overall response if the time constant is chosen appropriately