Abstract:
At Honeywell Technology Center, we are applying planning technology to help humans use complex automated systems. Some example systems are suites of NASA satellite image-processing programs for EOSDIS, schedulers for batch manufacturing processes and automated support for medical treatment protocols. The problem is one of providing what Pattie Maes [8] calls "indirect interaction:" allowing users to perform intuitively meaningful, high-level actions with simple commands. Unlike Etzioni [4], we are not concerned with demonstrating fully autonomous "softbots;" our goal is to provide semi-autonomous systems that work in cooperation with their human users.