Personalized Design and Experimental Validation of a Limited Information Cooperative Shared-Controller for Vehicle-Manipulators

Large vehicle-manipulators are systems consisting of a medium-sized heavy-duty vehicle and a hydraulic manipulator. They operate in an unstructured environment and are therefore not fully automated. However, semi-automation of such a system is possible, where the automation controls the vehicle and a human operator controls the manipulator. Since in the unstructured environment not all system trajectories are measurable for the automation, a so-called Limited Information Cooperative Shared-Controller (LICSC) has been proposed in previous work. However, the design of the LICSC is done through tuning which is sensitive to the operator controlling the manipulator. The first contribution of this work is to reduce this sensitivity. A novel personalized design of the LICSC is presented that provides control tailored to the human operator. Our proposed approach uses state-of-the-art design methods of a cooperative controller to obtain the LICSC. The second contribution is the experimental validation of the LICSC, which proves the importance of the personalization to the human operator and demonstrates the advantage of the method.