Consideration of Human Operators in Man-Machine Systems

This paper focuses on the stability and operability of a man-machine system considering a human operator. Some papers' main interest has been the stability only, but the operability such as fatigue is also the other main interest. In a man-machine system, feelings such as motional, visual, and kinesthetic are important since those enable operators to work easily or fatigue operators. A model of a man-machine system has been developed. Motional, visual, and kinesthetic feelings may be considered as feedbacked sensor signals. We also have quantified the degree of fatigue with respect to reference operation. This is a performance index to be optimized. Several methods are presented to optimize the degree of fatigue and the stability of the integrated system. Examples are presented to show that the usefulness of the proposed modeling method and fatigue mitigating algorithm.