Mutual initiative in human-machine teams

Abstract

Autonomous systems are widely used today in industry. The human-machine relationship in these systems is primarily that of a human supervisory role. This paper explores the concept of human-robot teams where each member of the team has the ability to assume initiative within a task. Key to this effort is not only the ability of the human to understand and predict robot performance, but the robot's ability to identify human needs and select intervention points to assume different levels of initiative. The objective is to incorporate mobile autonomous robots into human teams to augment both the human's cognitive and physical abilities in the performance of potentially hazardous tasks.