Improvement of Maneuvering Feeling of Human-Mechanical Cooperative System and Its Application to Electric Power Steering System

In human-mechanical cooperative systems, a significant issue is to improve the control performance and the maneuvering feeling of human operation. However, since it is not easy to evaluate the feeling of operators numerically, control engineers design controllers only through experience. Thus, in this paper, a new evaluation method for control performance of human-mechanical cooperative system is proposed based on the reserge waveform. Various distortions of waveform represent deteriorations of control performance and maneuvering feeling. In some cases, since there is a tradeoff between the control performance and the maneuvering feeling, it is difficult to compensate for both of them by usual feedback controllers. To overcome this situation, the two degrees of freedom control system is applied to human-mechanical cooperative system. Some numerical simulation results for an electric power steering system are shown to confirm the effectiveness of proposed control design method.