Improved understanding of human adaptation can be used to design better (semi-)automated systems that can support the human controller when task characteristics suddenly change. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of a model-based adaptive control technique, Model Reference Adaptive Control (MRAC), for describing the adaptive control policy used by human operators while controlling a time-varying system in a pursuit-tracking task. Ten participants took part in an experiment in which they controlled a time-varying system whose dynamics changed twice between approximate single and double integrator dynamics, and vice versa. Our proposed MRAC controller is composed of a feedforward and a feedback controller and an internal reference model that is used to drive an adaptive control policy. MRAC's adaptive control gains, the internal model parameters, and the learning rates were estimated from the experiment data using non-linear optimization aimed at maximizing the quality-of-fit of participants' control outputs. Participants' control behavior rapidly changed when the dynamics of the controlled system changed, in particular for transitions from single to double integrator dynamics. The MRAC model was indeed able to accurately capture the transient dynamics exhibited by the participants when the system changed from an approximate single to a double integrator, however, for the opposite transition the MRAC gains were always adapted too slowly. Therefore, in its current form, our MRAC model can be used to approximate human adaptation in pursuit tracking tasks when a change in the dynamics of the controlled system requires significant (rate) feedback controller adaptation to maintain satisfactory closed-loop control performance. @en

This paper investigates the interaction effects of motion filter order and break frequency on pilots’ manual control behavior and control performance using two simulators. Eighteen pilots performed the experiment in the Vertical Motion Simulator (VMS) at NASA Ames Research Center and 20 pilots in the SIMONA Research Simulator at Delft University of Technology. The experiment used a full-factorial design with three motion filter orders (first-, second-, and third-order) and two filter break frequencies (0.5 and 2.0  rad/s), in addition to reference no-motion and full-motion conditions. Key task variables, such as the quality of the motion and visual cues and the characteristics of the sidestick, were matched across both simulators. Overall, the expected effects of filter order and break frequency variations were found, with both increasing order and increasing break frequency causing pilots to use less motion feedback in their control strategy, resulting in lower tracking performance. Furthermore, across the wide range of filter orders tested in the experiment, the existing Sinacori–Schroeder motion fidelity criterion was found to be a good predictor of the interaction effects of both filter settings on pilot control behavior. For the same motion condition, there was a consistent offset in the results between simulators, due to the more high-gain control strategy adopted by a number of the VMS pilots. Still, the observed relative trends in pilot control behavior and performance between motion conditions were equivalent in both simulators and thus accurately replicated.@en