Predictive haptic guidance: intelligent user assistance for the control of dynamic tasks

Intelligent systems are increasingly able to offer real-time information relevant to a user\´s manual control of an interactive system, such as dynamic system control space constraints for animation control and driving. However, it is difficult to present this information in a usable manner and other approaches which have employed haptic cues for manual control in "slow" systems often lead to instabilities in highly dynamic tasks. We present a predictive haptic guidance method based on a look-ahead algorithm, along with a user evaluation which compares it with other approaches (no guidance and a standard potential-field method) in a 1-DoF steered path-following scenario. Look-ahead guidance outperformed the other methods in both quantitative performance and subjective preference across a range of path complexity and visibility and a force analysis demonstrated that it applied smaller and fewer forces to users. These results (which appear to derive from the predictive guidance\´s supporting users in taking earlier and more subtle corrective action) suggest the potential of predictive methods in aiding manual control of dynamic interactive tasks where intelligent support is available.