Overview of Human Adaptive Mechatronics and Assist-control to Enhance Human's Proficiency

Human Adaptive Mechatronics(HAM) is a new concept which was proposed in our university's research project sponsored by Japanese Ministry of Education, Sports, Culture, Science and Technology(MEXT), and is defined as "intelligent mechanical systems that adapt themselves to the user's skill under various environments, assist to improve the user's skill, and assist the human-machine system to achieve best performance". In this paper, the concept and key-items of HAM are mentioned. And the control strategy to realize a HAM human-machine system is explained in the case of physical-interface system, i.e. haptic system. The proposed assist-control of a force-feedback type haptic system includes online estimation of a operator's control characteristics, and a `force assist' function implemented as a change in the support ratio according to the identified skill level. We developed a HAM-haptic device test system, executed evaluation experiments with this apparatus, and analyzed the measured data. It was confirmed that the operator's skill could be estimated and that operator's performance was enhanced by the assist-control.