Teaching of robot task by manual control-iterative modification by a human operator

In teaching a complicated task to a robot manipulator, the human operator must control the slave manipulator satisfactorily for a long period of time. If the human operator improves the teaching data iteratively, satisfactory data are attained easily. The characteristics of the human operator´s control action are investigated experimentally during the process of iterative modification. It is shown that the human operator tries to reduce the lower frequency part of an error signal at the beginning of the process and later concentrates on the high-frequency part. After many modification trials, the error is reduced quickly; the decrease rate is dependent on the natural frequency of the slave manipulator