ABSTRACT
For their work, for transportation or simply for entertainment, human beings are often involved
in the manual control of devices. Vehicles such as cars, bicycles, ships, and airplanes are some
examples, but also video games and many work situations involve manual control. Normally,
after learning the task, the human operator in such a control situation behaves like a well-designed
controller. In fact, in their paper on “Quasi-linear pilot models,” McRuer and Jex make the remark
that data of measured pilot behavior matches very well with the Primary Rule of Thumb for
Frequency Domain Synthesis, a design rule for automatic controllers. It is not surprising, therefore,
that many of the models used in modeling manual control situations are based on various control
system design techniques. Two of the most commonly applied are the frequency domain design
methods, which serve as the basis for the cross-over model (COM) and variants thereof, the
precision model and the simplified precision model (McRuer and Jex, 1967), and optimal
control theory, which lies at the basis of the optimal control model (OCM; Kleinman et al.,
1970b).
