Supervisory Control of Remote Manipulators, Vehicles and Dynamic Processes: Experiments in Command and Display Aiding

摘要

This report is about supervisory control, an increasingly prevalent form of man-machine system wherein a human operator controls a process as the supervisor of a computer. The computer, in turn, may perform limited automatic control or it may process and display information from sensors. The particular context of interest here is supervisory control of manipulators and vehicles for remote inspection and work in the deep ocean. After giving a more detailed definition of supervisory control and providing examples, the report reviews a number of experimental studies conducted recently at the MIT Man-Machine System Laboratory. These are divided into two groups. The first group of studies is concerned with computer mediation in command and control of manipulation. The next group of experimental studies examines computer mediation in processing sensed information and displaying it to the human supervisor. A brief conclusion reviews how these experiments fit together and speculates on problems and prospects for supervisory control in manipulation, vehicle and process control, and other areas.