Validating a Human Controller Model for Preview Tracking Tasks

Identification of the Effects of Spatial Occlusion using Eye-Tracking

Master thesis (2016)

Authors

Contributors

D.M. Pool (mentor)
K. van der El (mentor)
M. Mulder (mentor)
Programme
Control and Simulation (Aerospace Engineering) (TU Delft)
Copyright: © 2016 Rezunenko, E.M.
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Published Date

31-10-2016

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Programme

Control and Simulation

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental validation of a recently developed two-point human controller (HC) model for preview tracking tasks. During a human-in-the-loop experiment, subjects tracked identical target signals with zero preview, 1.5 seconds of preview, and two occlusion conditions, blocking either the 0-0.5 s, or 0.35-0.85 s region from the HC’s view. Subjects’ gaze positions were recorded with a fixed-base eye-tracker. Measurements of the HC behavior were analyzed in the frequency domain by estimating the parameters of a quasi-linear model and compared to the distributions and means of the gaze data. The model fits accurately to the measurement data, therefore its validity is extended to occlusion scenarios. We suggest that internal processing of the target signal is performed by HCs, allowing them to respond to the signal inside the occlusion region by interpolating the last available position of the target preview. Results show a correlation between foveal gaze position and identified near-viewpoint locations, while the far-viewpoint is perceived peripherally by the HC. We consider the model viewpoints to be physically representative of the visual regions used by HC for gathering preview information.