Abstract
In this paper, we consider the manual control of a yo-yo which present us one of our familiar manipulation problems. We can easily control a yo-yo with visual and bodily sensitive feedback. It is a complex problem to replace the human operator with a controller, because we do not know the internal structure of the human operator. Since a human operator is included in a man-machine system, a meaningful performance index is sometimes very difficult to define.
Topics in this paper are summarized as follows: 1) We analyze the dynamical equations of a yo-yo theoretically and examine the various dynamical characteristics by the energy integral. 2) We present some input patterns as the experimental data which are up-and-down motions of an arm. 3) We formulate the optimal control problem and solve it utilizing the mathematical programming. Computational examples for a human operator are illustrated and the practical performance index is discussed as compared with the experimental results.
