Abstract
For the past hundred years cutaneous displays have been suggested for many purposes, including sensory feedback for remote manipulators and prosthetic limbs, sensory aids for the deaf and the blind, control and navigational displays for astronauts and aviators, and so on. Electrocutaneous stimulation using electric pulse trains is one of the most effective cutaneous displays. This paper deals with the human operator's characteristics in compensatory manual tracking system including an electrocutaneous display. Firstly, an electrocutaneous manual compensatory tracking system which consists of a random noise generator, a low-pass filter, a multichannel stimulator, a stimulus pulse energy controller, an isolator and a computer was constructed. Secondly the human operator's characteristics under several parameter situations in a compensatory tracking system, i.e., display transformation method, display gain, and pulse frequency, was estimated from the RMS values of the control errors and the transfer functions of human operators. Thirdly differences between human operator's control performance in various cutaneous and visual tracking displays were discussed. As a result, the optimal condition for the electrocutaneous display in a tracking control system was presented and human operator's control performance in an electrocutaneous manual tracking system was found to be as good as that with vibrotactile display though inferior to that mith visual display.
