Revisiting Active Manipulators in Aircraft Flight Control

This study revisits the active manipulator developed for manual aircraft control. The active manipulator sends the force applied by the pilot to the aircraft while feeding back the aircraft rotational velocity bymeans of its deflection angle. We find that the activemanipulator, in comparison with the conventional passive manipulator, greatly facilitates target following and disturbance rejection in compensatory tasks. We also find that greater improvements in task performance are associated with higher forcing-function bandwidths. The findings are accounted for by the fact that the active manipulator changes the effective controlled element dynamics into an integrator, and integrates the disturbance rejection into the neuromuscular system. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the haptic feel of the activemanipulator depends on the dynamics of the aircraft. With further exploration, we reveal that human haptic perception of the active manipulator could be characterized by mass-spring-damper properties.