A Safe and Robust Approach to Shared-Control via Dialogue

摘要

In shared-control systems, such as intelligent service robots, a human operator and an automated technical system are interdependently in charge of control. Effective shared control requires complex system architectures that provide safety and robustness in operation, while providing a user-friendly interface – provision of these dual requirements is a non-trivial task. In this paper, we report on our approach to addressing these issues. We present a dialogue centric cognitive control architecture, that utilises both agent-oriented programming and formal methods. Our SharC Cognitive Control Architecture is a hybrid design that distributes control of a robot amongst a community of deliberative intentional agents. Since safety is of paramount importance in shared-control systems, high-level safety issues must be addressed within such architectures. To this end, we also describe a formally modelled dialogue manager that sits at the heart of the control system. We illustrate the use of these distinct software paradigms with examples from our demonstration platform: Rolland, the Bremen autonomous wheelchair.