Abstract
The crew of a military vehicle driven at speed across country is subjected to a high level of low frequency random vibration with impacts of variable severity superimposed at random intervals. Crew members are frequently expected to perform tasks whilst on the move.
An experiment was carried out at the Royal Military College of Science (RMCS) to compare the effect on human response of three levels of whole body random z-axis acceleration, and of the lowest of these levels with two levels of randomly occuring impacts superimposed. The tracking errors generated by twelve subjects attempting a z-axis zero order compensatory tracking task whilst exposed to these vibrations were measured. The results suggest that for the random vibration inputs the mean absolute error increases linearly with rms acceleration, but that the additional error due to the impacts increases in proportion to the peak acceleration raised to the power 2.5.
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