Contrasting potential fields and constraints in a shared control task

Shared control between a human supervisor and an autonomous discrete event control system is the focus of this paper. Two task must be considered simultaneously: 1) restricting the human input; and 2) determining the autonomous control commands. For these purposes, methods utilising either state dependent constraints or potential fields are considered. Each of these methods has advantages over the other in providing the desired control function. This paper contrasts the methods as well as presenting experimental results demonstrating the effectiveness of each of the methods in a variety of tasks