Investigating the Difference Between Single and Dual Axis Manual Control

Investigating the Difference Between Single and Dual Axis Manual Control

Barendswaard, S.

Pool, D. (mentor)
Mulder, M. (mentor)
Paassen, M.M. (mentor)

Aerospace Engineering

Control and Simulation

2016-03-15

Aircraft manual control tasks require simultane- ous control of multiple degrees-of-freedom. Unfortunately, most multi-axis human-operator modeling is limited to the modeling of multiple fully-independent axis. Therefore our goal is to contribute to the understanding of multi-axis manual control behaviour and develop a more realistic picture of dual axis manual control behaviour. The results of the human-in-the-loop experiment carried out in SIMONA Research Simulator has facil- itated the study of four distinctive phenomena which are proven to occur in multi-axis control tasks: performance degradation, axis asymmetry, crossfeed and intermittency. Crossfeed occurs when operators’ inputs in one controlled axis feed into another controlled degree-of-freedom, thereby affecting overall control performance. Intermittency is a type of non-linear behaviour, caused by time-varying axis prioritization. Three conditions were experimentally tested in the presence and absence of motion: the full dual-axis control task, single-axis roll task and single-axis pitch task. The results of the data analysis show that the error variance and crossover frequency indicate that the performance is worse in dual axis than it is for its baseline single-axis condition. The performance in the roll axis is consistently worse than pitch, thereby proving axis asymmetry. Motion has been found to improve the error variance and stability of the system. The application of independent forcing function signals in both controlled axes, resulted in the detection of crossfeed in dual- axis tasks from spectral analysis. Furthermore, using a novel extended Fourier Coefficient method, the identified crossfeed dynamics explains up to 20% of the measured control inputs and improves modeling accuracy by up to 5%. Dual axis control behaviour is less accurately modeled with linear time-invariant models, and with more unaccounted for peaks, gives an indication of intermittency.

manual control cybernetics
system identification
Fourier Coefficient Method
multi-axis control

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:ca862c9c-250d-42be-8fb1-b8bb8e637d1c

2019-03-15

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2016 Barendswaard, S.