Human-machine control model approach to enhance operator skills

In what concerns human-machine interaction, two main driving forces are performance and usability. In systems where the human operator integrates the control loop (HIL - human in the loop) one wishes to minimize its effort and fatigue, without compromising the performance. The paper proposes a design approach where the influence of the operator dynamics in the closed loop is taken into account, by means of dynamic compensation. A frequency analysis based procedure is used to obtain an operator model from experimental data. The human-machine model is used to synthesize a LQG based dynamic compensator which significantly improves the performance while reducing the operator effort.