Everybody Needs Somebody Sometimes: Validation of Adaptive Recovery in Robotic Space Operations

Abstract

This letter assesses an adaptive approach to fault recovery in autonomous robotic space operations, which uses indicators of opportunity, such as physiological state measurements and observations of past human assistant performance, to inform future selections. We validated our reinforcement learning approach using data we collected from humans executing simulated mission scenarios. We present a method of structuring human-factors experiments that permits collection of relevant indicator of opportunity and assigned assistance task performance data, as well as evaluation of our adaptive approach, without requiring large numbers of test subjects. Application of our reinforcement learning algorithm to our experimental data shows that our adaptive assistant selection approach can achieve lower cumulative regret compared to existing nonadaptive baseline approaches when using real human data. Our work has applications beyond space robotics to any application where autonomy failures may occur that require external intervention.