Abstract
Recent research in human-robot interaction has investigated the concept of Sliding, or Adjustable, Autonomy, a mode of operation bridging the gap between explicit teleoperation and complete robot autonomy. This work has largely been in single-agent domains-involving only one human and one robot-and has not examined the issues that arise in multiagent domains. We discuss the issues involved in adapting Sliding Autonomy concepts to coordinated multiagent teams. In our approach, remote human operators have the ability to join, or leave, the team at will to assist the autonomous agents with their tasks (or aspects of their tasks) while not disrupting the team's coordination. Agents model their own and the human operator's performance on subtasks to enable them to determine when to request help from the operator. To validate our approach, we present the results of two experiments. The first evaluates the human/multirobot team's performance under four different collaboration strategies including complete teleoperation, pure autonomy, and two distinct versions of Sliding Autonomy. The second experiment compares a variety of user interface configurations to investigate how quickly a human operator can attain situational awareness when asked to help. The results of these studies support our belief that by incorporating a remote human operator into multiagent teams, the team as a whole becomes more robust and efficient
Highlights
As expectations for robotic systems increase, it becomes harder and harder to meet them with the capabilities of a single robot
The task involved a pick-and-place operation during which Sliding Autonomy allowed the operator to recover from visual servoing errors, participate in high-level planning, and teleoperate the manipulator to complete tasks beyond its autonomous capabilities. Our work extends this with a more complex assembly task that involves a team of robots and a finer granularity of Sliding Autonomy
We have found that there are three ways in which multi-agent Sliding Autonomy is more demanding than the single-agent version: (1) deciding when to ask for help, as the human is not guaranteed to be monitoring any one robot at any given time; (2) assisting the human in gaining situational awareness of the requesting robot’s workspace when he is asked for help; and (3) maintaining coordination of the team as a whole when the human is controlling one of the robotic agents
Summary
As expectations for robotic systems increase, it becomes harder and harder to meet them with the capabilities of a single robot. Our goal is to develop a framework within which a single human operator can oversee and intervene in the operation of a team of largely autonomous robots One scenario exemplifying this approach is the assembly of large structures in hazardous environments, such as orbital solar power arrays or Mars habitats. There is a clear point at which the time taken to absorb additional information outweighs the corresponding decrease in response time The results from these two experiments bolster our contention that Sliding Autonomy can be an effective approach to robust control of multi-robot teams. Our system is comprised of multiple mobile and stationary robots They must flexibly coordinate their motions in order to complete the assembly task, and adapt to a dynamic, uncertain environment; this requires close coordination between various combinations of heterogeneous robots, often involving more than one robot simultaneously manipulating the structure. Two heterogeneous robots collaboratively carry a beam and position it with respect to an existing structure with sub-centimeter accuracy
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