Passivity analysis of a human operator in a human-machine control system considering maneuverability

The maneuverability for the human operator, that is, how well the skillful task can be performed corresponding to the intentional operation by the operator, is one of the most important design objectives for human-machine cooperative systems with skillful operations. From the viewpoint of the human operator, a human-machine cooperative system can be regarded as a manual control system with force reflection. According to the authors´ previous study on such manual control systems, the human operator shapes his/her own dynamics operation corresponding to the object dynamics. Also, the success of the self-shaping is closely related to the maneuverability of the operator. Besides, the authors have recently discovered that the operator shows active operation for the object which yields a successful self-shaping, which contradicts to a conventional human-passivity assumption on HMCS studies. Based on these results, the present study addresses experimental analysis of the maneuverability of HMCSs with the different tool dynamics, focusing on the self-shaping properties and the operation energy of the human operator.