AsianScientist (Oct. 25, 2016) – An international team of scientists have come up with a theory and experimental evidence for a new human behavior prediction method. Their work was published in the IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica.
Human unpredictability is a problem in the increasingly automated systems people use every day. The cruise control feature in a car will automatically accelerate on a hill to maintain speed against gravity, but if another car slows unexpectedly, it depends on the driver to apply the brakes. The system doesn’t make decisions; it simply reacts to the input. As such, the inability to perfectly predict human operator behavior hinders advanced system design.
To find a solution, scientists from Nanjing Institute of Technology’s School of Automation in China and researchers from the University of California in the US partnered up to find a programming solution for erratic human behavior. The researchers’ proposed model is based on fractional order calculus, where multiple outcomes can be considered within the same equation.
“[Our] model for human operator behavior has many advantages, such as a simple structure with few parameters, [all] with clear physical meaning,” said lead author Professor Huang Jiacai. “More importantly, the proposed new model gives a unified, formalized description for the human operator behavior.”
The human operator is modeled as a part of the system rather than an addition to the system, as traditional modeling does. To experimentally test this idea, the scientists created a closed-loop system in which a person followed a target on the screen with a steering wheel. Compared to traditional mathematical models, the proposed method was a better fit for how the human operator actually behaved. Indeed, Huang noted, the human operator is a complex system, and many aspects of the human brain and behavior have the characteristics of a fractional order system.
The researchers plan to study how their human operator model could improve advanced systems, such as autopilot in planes or for robotic use in surgeries.
The article can be found at: Huang et al. (2016) Fractional Order Modeling of Human Operator Behavior with Second Order Controlled Plant and Experiment Research.
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Source: Chinese Association of Automation; Photo: Pixabay.
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