Skill Evaluation in Human Adaptive Mechatronics. Bimanual Operation with X-y Stages

In this paper, some HAM (Human Adaptive Mechatronics) research results on operator skill evaluation, operation assistance, identification of operator's dynamics, skill acquisition, and coupling phenomenon in bimanual operation are presented at first. Then the bimanual operation is discussed in detail. The phenomenon of spatial coupling between two different tasks performed by two hands respectively (bimanual operation) and the effect of frequency ratio and phase-lag between two circle tracking tasks on the bimanual operation are investigated in this paper. Two XY-stages developed in Tokyo Denki University are used as humanmachine interfaces, with which various experiments on human bimanual cooperative operations have been conducted to investigate the human operation characteristics for the development of human adaptive mechatronic systems. In this paper, three experiments of bimanual operation are presented, with which the phenomenon of spatial coupling was clearly observed. It was also found in the experiments that the human operator can develop his/her skill of bimanual operation much easier with some frequency ratio and some phase-lag.