Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Institute of Systems, Control and Information Engineers

Fuzzy control is applied to the anti-rolling device of a high-speed catamaran boat in order to improve the system performance. A PID control was initially installed in the system, however no significant effects were observed for the passengers although instrumental data showed good results. The fuzzy system has shown good instrumental data but also provided good comfort ride for the passengers. Also, some experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed rolling fuzzy control for the high-speed catamaran boat.

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This article puts forth a hypothesis of stages of acquiring physical rules by a robot, and describes issues to develop the robotic program. The first stage is a learning stage without words, and the second stage is a learning stage with words. The second stage has two sub stages; in the first sub stage, the robotic program does not write or read words, and in the second sub stage, the program writes and reads words. Issues to be raised include how to extract physical rules out of continuous flow of sensory and motor inputs, how to construct hierarchical structures of physical rules (or causes and effects) out of continuous flow of the inputs, and what assumptions can be made for trying to construct a robot that acquires physical rules.

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In this paper, we propose an algorithm for the supremal controllable and deadlock-free subpredicate and apply the proposed algorithm to a design procedure of alarms in human-machine systems. The authors have proposed the design of alarm based on the state feedback control of discrete event systems. In the existing state feedback based alarm system, the user can avoid automation surprises, but may sometimes come to a deadlock. By applying the proposed algorithm to the human-machine systems, we design an alarm system which is able to avoid both automation surprises and deadlocks.

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By introducing advanced automation, high accuracy, efficiency, and adaptability have been achieved in large scale and high-tech systems such as nuclear power plants and modern aircrafts.On the other hand, when we consider a situation that a human operator supervises such enhanced systems, the complexity of interaction between the human and the machine causes many unpredictable problems. For example, the user can not follow behavior of the machine through a user-interface, which shows partial information of the current mode of the machine.Thus, a current mode of the machine may differ from that anticipated by the user so that breakdown in the interaction between users and machines occurs.This phenomenon is called an automation surprise, which may yield to a serious human error.These problems mainly result from the incompleteness of information between the machine and the user.So it is an important problem to design a user-interface which plays an intermediate role in human-machine systems.In this paper, we analyze the human-machine interaction based on discrete event system theory and address the verification of automation surprises.Moreover, we develop a software which implements the proposed verification method and refer to the specification of this software.When we model the human-machine systems as discrete event systems, automation surprises can be classified into three types; a mode confusion, a blocking state, and a refusal state.We give a mathematical definition to each undesirable situation and propose a systematic procedure of the verification of automation surprises.In our proposed procedure, we construct a composite model in which a machine model and a user model evolve concurrently and implement an algorithm for searching of automation surprises. Finally, we show the usefulness of our proposed method by using our software.

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