Individual Differences in Manual Control Cybernetics: Predicting Individual Cybernetic Parameters Using the Human Controller Cost Function

Understanding individual differences in manual control cybernetics plays a principal role in personalizing human-machine systems. While much of the work in cybernetics utilizes models for the average controller, individualized models have also been explored, albeit constrained by data availability and the effectiveness of identification...

Creating Monsters: crafting gender ambiguous child toys through reflexive designer-AI interactions

Growing up, social constructs like roles, norms and values are being internalised and naturalised. Despite offering a sense of stability, such constructs also prohibit equality, justice and diversity, by pushing people into categories, roles and norms they do not represent. However, once internalised, social constructs fall under the surface of...

3D-Paintbrush: Melting and cooling plastics

This thesis describes the process of redesigning the 3D-paintbrush. It looks into extruder screws for plastics and finds the best design variables for the 3D-paintbrush. Vortex cooling has been used to cool the extruded plastics fast and efficient. With the findings for melting and cooling the thesis looks at human-machine interaction and...

Embodied Conversational Agent for Mental Health Intervention

Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA) seek to provide a more natural means of interaction for a user through verbal and non-verbal properties of human face-to-face communication. For this reason, these systems are found to bring benefits in different mental health related interventions. However, a key challenge in developing agents to replace the...

Distributed Control of Underactuated and Heterogeneous Mechanical Systems: Using Passivity-Based Control by Interconnection and Damping Assignment as a Tool for Distributed Control Design and Human-Machine Interaction

Passivity-based control is a well-established technique for coordinating groups of fully-actuated systems, but existing methods for underactuated systems are limited to groups of homogeneous systems, coordinate synchronization tasks, and to specific applications. We propose a generic distributed control method that enables heterogeneous groups...

Augmented Reality Based Driver Interaction: Aspects of Situational Awareness, Automotive Branding and User Experience

Technological advancements have resulted in vehicles gaining the ability to effortlessly compile data required to generate Situational Awareness. Situational Awareness is defined as the continuous (re-)processing of information leading to an intangible spatial representation of the environment. While vehicles effortlessly compile Situational...

A New Design of Human-Machine Interaction for Steering Articulated Truck Combinations

The main reason for accidents involving trucks or truck combinations is the lack of situation awareness. Drivers of particularly articulated truck combinations need a high level of awareness about the state of the vehicle combination and its surroundings. The current steering interface sets limits on the signals that the driver can perceive and...

Maximum Likelihood Estimation of Linear Time-Varying Pilot-Vehicle System Parameters