Validation of a Grip Force Scheduled LPV Model of Time-Varying Neuromuscular Admittance

Abstract

Haptic Shared Control (HSC) systems offer a means to support human drivers in the transition to fully-automated driving. Matching HSC systems settings with drivers’ time-varying neuromuscular system (NMS) dynamics requires real-time HSC adaptations. This paper presents an experimental validation of a previously proposed method for predicting drivers’ time-varying neuromuscular admittance using an ‘average’ grip force scheduled linear parameter varying (LPV) model. The quality of LPV model predictions is compared to that of Recursive Least Squares (RLS) fits of an admittance model on the same data. Ten participants performed steering wheel manipulation tasks with steering wheel perturbations that needed to be kept within a certain displacement boundary by adapting their grip force. Time-invariant (TI) and time-varying (TV) boundary levels were used to, respectively, construct and validate the LPV model. Results show that the average relation between admittance and grip force that underlies the current LPV method varies too much between TV and TI tasks, hampering accurate admittance predictions. Compared to the quality-of-fit of 80-90% obtained with RLS on the TV data, the LPV model’s predictions are insufficiently accurate and do not exceed 55% on average. An approach that enables individual instead of average LPV models to be constructed directly from TV experiment data needs to be pursued for HSC implementations.