The Robotics Institute

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

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Abstract

The vision of humans and robots working together as peers to accomplish complex tasks has motivated many recent research endeavors with a variety of applications ranging from lunar construction to soccer. However, much of this research is still at an early stage, and many challenges still remain in realizing this vision. A key requirement for enabling robustness and efficiency in human-robot teams is the ability to dynamically adjust the level of autonomy to optimize the use of resources and capabilities as conditions evolve. While sliding autonomy is well defined and understood in applications where a single human is working with a single robot, it is largely unexplored when applied to teams of humans working with multiple robots. This paper highlights the challenges of enabling sliding autonomy in peer-to-peer human-robot teams and extends the current literature to identify six key capabilities that are essential for overcoming these challenges. These capabilities are requesting help, maintaining coordination, establishing situational awareness, enabling interactions at different levels of granularity, prioritizing team members, and learning from interactions. We demonstrate the importance of these characteristics with results from a peer-to-peer human-robot team engaged in a treasure hunt task.

Keywords

Sliding autonomy, human-robot teams, peer-to-peer teams, pickup teams, autonomous teamwork, multi-agent coordination, adjustable autonomy

Notes

Sponsor: Boeing Company

Grant ID: CMU-BA-GTA-1

Associated Lab(s) / Group(s): MultiRobot Lab

Associated Project(s): Treasure Hunt: Pickup Teams

Text Reference

M Bernardine Dias, Balajee Kannan, Brett Browning, Edward Jones, Brenna Argall, Malcolm Frederick Dias, Marc B. Zinck, Manuela Veloso, and Anthony (Tony) Stentz, "Sliding Autonomy for Peer-To-Peer Human-Robot Teams," tech. report CMU-RI-TR-08-16, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, April, 2008

BibTeX Reference

@techreport{Dias_2008_6036,
   author = "M Bernardine Dias and Balajee Kannan and Brett Browning and Edward Jones and Brenna Argall and Malcolm Frederick Dias and Marc B Zinck and Manuela Veloso and Anthony (Tony) Stentz",
   title = "Sliding Autonomy for Peer-To-Peer Human-Robot Teams",
   booktitle = "",
   institution = "Robotics Institute",
   month = "April",
   year = "2008",
   number= "CMU-RI-TR-08-16",
   address= "Pittsburgh, PA",
}

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