Shared Control between Human and Machine: Using a Haptic Steering Wheel to Aid in Land Vehicle Guidance

When humans interface with machines, the control interface is usually passive and its response contains little information pertinent to the state of the environment. Usually, information flows through the interface from human to machine but not so often in the reverse direction. This work proposes a control architecture in which bi-directional information transfer occurs across the control interface, allowing the human to use the interface to simultaneously exert control and extract information. In this alternative control architecture, which we call shared control, the human utilizes the haptic sensory modality to share control of the machine interface with an automatic controller. We present a fixed-base driving simulator experiment in which subjects take advantage of a haptic steering wheel, which aids them in a path following task. Results indicate that the haptic steering wheel allows a significant reduction in visual demand while improving path following performance.