The Normality of Signals and Describing Function Measurements of Simple Manual Control Systems

The distribution functions of amplitude of the error, response and remnant signals in a simple, compensatory, manual control system were computed for a variety of input signal bandwidths and spectral shapes. χ<R>2</R> goodness-of-fit tests of the normality of these distributions were performed. Distribution functions of the measured values of several transformations of the describing functions for the human operator and for the closed-loop system were also computed and compared to a normal distribution in order to find the form that was most nearly normal.