Abstract
Our intention in this paper is to investigate fundamental characteristics of human inching operation. In our investigation, we adopted a tracing model-task of a reference tarajectry by ON/OFF manipulation, which can be regarded as the most simple type of inching operation.
As the results from our experiments, we obtained that inching operation has the tendency called as the bath-tab-curve for D/C ratio, similar to human continuous operation, and there exist two types of inching operation, say, “Control by ON hold-time”, and “Control by OFF hold-time”.
Under each type of the operations, the reference of deviation in switching seems to have a great effect on manual control errors. From the facts described above, a simple model of human switching criteria was introduced and, to some extent, the validity of this model was confirmed by other verification experiments.
