Traded Control with Autonomous Robots as Mixed Initiative Interaction

Abstract

This paper describes a problem domain that lends it-self to mixed initiative interaction. The domain is traded control with an autonomous robot. Traded control is a situation in which a human wants to con-trol a robot during part of a task and the robot is au-tonomous 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 dan-gerous 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 plan-ner, an execution monitor, robotic skills and a user interface. This paper describes the problem domain and our initial attempts at defining a software archi-tecture that operates in the domain.