Limited Information Shared Control: A Potential Game Approach

Abstract

This paper presents a systematic method for the design of a limited information shared controller (LISC). LISC is used in applications where not all system states or references trajectories are measurable by the automation. Typical examples are partially human controlled systems, in which some subsystems are fully controlled by the automation, while others are controlled by a human. The proposed systematic design uses a novel class of games to model human-machine interaction:The near potential differential games (NPDG). We provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of an NPDG and derive an algorithm for finding a NPDG which completely describes a given differential game. The proposed design method is applied to the control of a large vehicle manipulator system, in which the manipulator is controlled by the human operator and the vehicle is fully automated. The suitability of the NPDG modelling differential games is verified in simulations leading to a faster and more accurate controller design compared to manual tuning. Furthermore, the overall design process is validated in a study with sixteen test subjects indicating the applicability of the proposed concept in real applications.

Validation of a Limited Information Shared Controller: A Comparative Study

“…where the matrices Ξ (a) and Ξ (h) are parameters, which can characterize the cooperative setup. In [6], a method for a systematic identification of Ξ (a) and Ξ (h) is presented. This cooperation state (3) is used to extend (1), which leads to an extended model, in which all the system states are measurable:…”

“…If the lateral controllers are active, the operator only has to control the manipulator and the vehicle guidance is autonomous. The procedure computing the feedback control laws are presented in detail in [6], here only the results are provided.…”

“…The LISC has the structure of feedback control law as given in (6), where the extended system state is x e = [d v , ∆θ v , δ, x κ ]. The input of the LVM is computed by (7).…”

“…Furthermore, the issue is addressed whether the proposed LISC can relieve the operator compared the manual mode or NCC. A direct comparison between the objective performance of NCC and LISC was already given in [6]. Two hypotheses are formed for the analysis: H1 LISC leads to significantly better performance compared to manual operation.…”

“…This paper presents the validation of the design concept of the LISC [6] and a comparison with the actual state-of-the-art control, which is the manual control mode without automation. In this case, the operator has to control the manipulator and keeps the vehicle on its reference simultaneously.…”