Traded Control with Autonomous Robots as Mixed Initiative Interaction

Computational Models for Mixed Initiative Interaction

Volume

Papers from the 1997 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

This paper describes a problem domain that lends itself to mixed initiative interaction. The domain is traded control with an autonomous robot. Traded control is a situation in which a human wants to control a robot during part of a task and the robot is autonomous during other parts of a task. A significant problem in traded control situations is that the robot doesn’t know how the environment has been changed or what parts of the task have been accomplished when the human has been in control. Because of this, errors can occur when the human relinquishes control back to the robot; these errors can cause potentially dangerous situations. Our solution is to use an intelligent software architecture designed for autonomous robot control and modify it to work in concert with human control. Using an architecture designed for autonomy allows us to use the monitoring functions designed to track the actions of the robot to monitor the actions of human agents for the same tasks. The intelligent software architecture includes a mixed initiative planner, an execution monitor, robotic skills and a user interface. This paper describes the problem domain and our initial attempts at defining a software architecture that operates in the domain.