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Abstract

Haptic aids have been largely used in manual control tasks to complement the visual information through the sense of touch. To analytically design the haptic aid, adequate knowledge is needed about how pilots adapt their visual response and the biomechanical properties of their arm to a generic haptic aid. Two novel identification methods were proposed to estimate the pilot dynamic responses. The two methods were applied to experimental data from closed-loop control tasks with pilots, with the aim of estimating the pilot responses to different external aids. Different haptic aids were designed and tested during the experiments: a Direct Haptic Aid (DHA) and an Indirect Haptic Aid (IHA). Furthermore, an automated system was designed to be equivalent to the haptic aids when the pilot was out-of-the-loop, i.e., to provide the same control command as the haptic aid. All the experimental conditions with the external aids were contrasted to a baseline condition without external aids.