Humans and Machines: Sharing the Work and Exploiting the Skills Problem description:

With the advances in technology, a variety of intelligent systems has been developed in order to enhance the human abilities. Cars assisting in steering and lane following [1], artificial limbs [3] and assistive robots [2] are only a few examples. Such control scenarios, in which the human as well as the internal control of the system influence the executed action, require so-called shared control. The goal is to divide the responsibilities to exploit the strengths of the human and the machine. This requires a communication and feedback channel between human and machine as the system needs to anticipate the human intention and combine it with collected sensor data to derive an appropriate behavior. However, as human intentions are difficult to assess and actions vary greatly between individuals, this introduces uncertainties in the interaction which may even lead to instabilities [4], such creating the need for a robust control scheme. In this work, the student should get acquainted with the concepts of shared control. The different fields of application should be analyzed with respect to the individual challenges and the proposed solutions should be discussed. Finally, the individual advantages and disadvantages should be identified. Bibliography: [1] P. Griffiths and R.B. Gillespie. Shared control between human and machine: Haptic display o