Stefano Geluardi

Evaluation of haptic support system for training purposes in a tracking task

Haptic guidance has previously been employed to improve human performance in control tasks. This paper presents an experiment to evaluate whether haptic feedback can be used to help humans learn a compensatory tracking task. In the experiment, participants were divided into two groups: the haptic group and the no-aid group. The haptic group performed a first training phase with haptic feedback and a second evaluation phase without haptic feedback. The no-aid group performed the whole experiment without haptic feedback. Results indicated that haptic group achieved better performance than the no-aid group during the training phase. Furthermore, performance of haptic group did not worsen in the evaluation phase when the haptic feedback was turned off. Moreover, the no-aid group needed more experimental trials to achieve similar performance to the haptic group. These findings indicate that haptic feedback helped participants learn the task quicker.

Switching control of an underwater glider with independently controllable wings

Abstract This paper presents a control-oriented dynamic model of an underwater glider with independently controllable wings. We show that this particular feature is particularly useful to improve the vehicles maneuverability. The only actuators here used are a ballast tank and two hydrodynamic wings. A switching control strategy, together with a backstepping control scheme, is designed to limit the action of the ballast tank and hence to enforce energy-efficient maneuvers. We consider a case study in which the vehicle has the hydrodynamic wings behind its main hull. This structure is motivated by the recently-introduced concept of the underwater wave glider, that is a vehicle capable of both surface and underwater navigation. The control algorithm is validated via numerical simulations of the vehicle performing three-dimensional path-following maneuvers.

Variable force-stiffness haptic feedback for learning a disturbance rejection task

This paper investigates the use of a variable haptic feedback for training a disturbance rejection task. The haptic feedback was designed as a Force-Stiffness feedback. Throughout the training, Force and Stiffness feedback are decreased to progressively give more control authority to the human operator. The training method was tested in a human-in-the-loop experiment. In the experiment, participants were split into three groups: variable haptic aid (VHA), constant haptic aid (CHA) and no haptic aid (NoHA). The VHA and CHA groups performed a first training phase with variable and constant haptic feedback respectively, followed by an evaluation phase without external aids. The NoHA group performed the entire experiment without external aids. Results showed that in the training phase both VHA and CHA groups performed better than NoHA group. In the evaluation phase though, only the VHA group obtained better performances than the NoHA group. Specifically, participants were able to quickly recover similar performances to those obtained at the end of the training phase. Thus, the variable haptic training proved to be more effective than the constant haptic training and manual control at helping participants learn the task.

Transforming Civil Helicopters into Personal Aerial Vehicles: Modeling, Control, and Validation

This paper presents the implementation of robust control strategies to augment an identified state-space model of a civil light helicopter. The aim of this study is to augment the helicopter model ...