IEEE Newsletter

Technical Committee on Shared Control

Scope

Members of the Technical Committee on Shared Control envision a world in which human-machine interaction is safer, more intuitive, more comfortable and more robust to differences in environment and users. The aim of the Committee is to accelerate research towards that goal, by stimulating scientific discussions and international collaborations, in both academia and industry. Over the past decades the principles of shared control have been gaining interest in a broad range of research and engineering communities as a design approach that integrates the best of both worlds: the fast, reliable, precise and inexhaustible task execution capabilities of automation and the complementary inventive, adaptive and interactive task execution skills of humans. Although recent research has shown that shared control can enhance the capabilities of both humans and automation in a wide variety of applications (driving, flying, wheelchair control, tele-operation of robots, etc.), there is not much consensus on how to design or particularly how to evaluate such systems.
We aim to reach our goals by providing a platform to gain consensus about design and evaluation of shared control systems, across different application fields. Further details about the TC and its recent activities are available on our website.

Membership

We are have a rapidly growing membership and welcome people from a broad range of engineering disciplines who are interested in shared control, be it PhD students or seasoned professors! We are an active group and our members contribute to the community through a number of different ways, e.g. by helping to organise our events (special sessions, workshops, tutorials etc.) and attending them, submitting high quality articles to the SMC publications and actively participating in the peer-review process.

Date started

Officially, the technical committee started January 1st 2013. However, its founding members Tom Carlson, Mark Mulder and David Abbink already organized several well-attended IEEE SMC activities, after which they were invited to form an official IEEE SMC Technical Committee:
? 2011 Special session on Shared Control at IEEE SMC, Anchorage, Alaska
? 2012 Workshop on Shared Control at IEEE SMC, Seoul, Korea
? 2012 Special session on Shared Control at IEEE SMC, Seoul, Korea

Goals for the next five years

Organize activities that accelerate research in shared control, and stimulating discussions and high-quality dissemination of research in shared control, by:

a. Organizing special sessions and workshops at the coming IEEE SMC events
? 2013 Interactive Workshop on Shared Control at IEEE SMC 2013, Manchester, UK
? 2013 Special Session on Shared Control at IEEE SMC 2013, Manchester, UK
? 2013 A tutorial at IEEE CYBCONF 2013, Lausanne, Switzerland
? continue this tradition for future events that are affiliated with IEEE SMC

b. Organizing a platform, in the form of an extended website (with several newsletters per year) of the Technical Committee to inform of future events and act as a central information hub for the emerging Shared Control community.

c. Organize the writing of a joint journal paper for the new IEEE SMC Transactions on Human-Machine Systems
? A review paper, with state of the art, challenges and future directions
? Involve as many interested TC members as possible (many authors, many perspectives)

d. Ultimately, proposing and organizing a high-quality special issue on Shared Control in one of the IEEE SMC journals.

Three most important papers since the beginning the committee

M. Mulder, D. A. Abbink, and E. R. Boer, "Sharing Control With Haptics: Seamless Driver Support From Manual to Automatic Control," Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, vol. 54, no. 5, pp. 786-798, May 2012.

D. A. Abbink, M. Mulder, F. C. T. van Der Helm, M. Mulder, and E. R. Boer, "Measuring Neuromuscular Control Dynamics During Car Following With Continuous Haptic Feedback," IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Part B, vol. 41, no. 5, pp. 1239-1249, 2011.

T. Carlson and J.d.R. Millan. "Brain-Controlled Wheelchairs: A Robotic Architecture", in IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 65-73, 2013.