Experiments of human-robot teaming under sliding autonomy

Abstract

This paper describes a sliding autonomy approach for coordinating a team of robots to assist the human operator to accomplish tasks while adapting to new or unexpected situations by requesting help from the human operator. While sliding autonomy has been well studied in the context of controlling a single robot. Much work needs to be done to apply sliding autonomy to a multi-robot team, especially human-robot team. Our approach extends the traditional sliding autonomy by including a new mode that support human-robot peer-to-peer collaboration. We validated our approach in the USARSim simulation and on physical robots, and demonstrated that the human-robot team's overall performance can be improved under the sliding autonomy control.