Limited Information Shared Control: A Potential Game Approach

This article presents a systematic method for the design of a limited information shared control (LISC). LISC is used in applications where not all system states or references trajectories are measurable by the automation. Typical examples are partially human controlled systems, in which some subsystems are fully controlled by the automation, whereas others are controlled by a human. The proposed systematic design uses a novel class of games to model human–machine interaction: the near potential differential games (NPDG). We provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of an NPDG and derive an algorithm for finding a NPDG, which completely describes a given differential game. The proposed design method is applied to the control of a large vehicle manipulator system, in which the manipulator is controlled by the human operator and the vehicle is fully automated. The suitability of the NPDG modeling differential games is verified in simulations leading to a faster and more accurate controller design compared with manual tuning. Furthermore, the overall design process is validated in a study with 16 test subjects indicating the applicability of the proposed concept in real applications.