Serge Debernard

In the human–machine field of research, the term machine refers not only to computers, but also to diverse control devices in complex dynamic situations, such as industrial processes or transportation networks. Human activities are mainly oriented toward decision-making, including monitoring and fault detection, fault anticipation, diagnosis and prognosis, and fault prevention and recovery. The objectives of this decision-making are related to human–machine system performance (production quantity and quality), as well as to overall system safety.

Manufacturing companies have to be more and more competitive. They have to improve continuously products quality, as well as reducing cost and shorting production time. The paper focuses on the design of a system that is able to ensure product quality and process protection against damages. The system, so-called “robust filter”, has to stop the process when the command, firstly prepared by process engineer, does not cope anymore with process state. Indeed, some modifications would have been introduced by other agents according to new orders or process' components. But when the process is stopped, all information that could provide clues to explain problem are removed. So, Human-Machine interfaces have been proposed in order to support maintenance agents' activity when they have to understand errors in command. The design of such interfaces has been performed with the principles stemming from the Human-Machine Cooperation approaches and assessed with students.

The paper deals with the design of lateral shared vehicle control taking into account the interaction between the driver and the assistance system. The shared control system is designed in such a way to ensure a good transfer of the control authority without generating negative interference. For that a driver model that allows making valid predictions on the driver behaviour is integrated in the design process of the controller. In order to avoid complex conflict situations such as during lane change maneuver, a decision making algorithm for the control authority shifting is also proposed and implemented. Experimental results provided in the paper, using interactive simulator, show the effectiveness of the approach to ensure shared lateral vehicle control.

This paper describes a concept of lane keeping assistance system based on the fuzzy Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) optimal controller. Nonlinearities due to longitudinal velocity variation in the lateral dynamics are considered to give a T-S representation and Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMI) are used to reach the appropriate T-S optimal controller that insure the global stability of the closed loop system. In conclusion the effectiveness of the proposed approach is illustrated in Matlab/Simulink and experimental tests carried out on the ”SHERPA” (Simulateur Hybride d'Etude et de Recherche de PSA pour l'Automobile) simulator.