Principles of adjustable autonomy: a framework for resilient human-machine cooperation

Unmanned ground vehicles tend to be more and more autonomous, but both complete teleoperation and full autonomy are not efficient enough to deal with all possible situations. To be efficient, the human-robot system must be able to anticipate, react and recover from errors of different kinds, i.e., to be resilient. From this observation, this paper proposes a survey on the resilience of a human-machine system and the means to control the resilience. The resilience of a system can be defined as the ability to maintain or recover a stable state when subject to disturbance. Adjustable autonomy and human-machine cooperation are considered as means of resilience for the system. This paper then proposes three indicators to assess different meanings of resilience of the system: foresight and avoidance of events, reaction to events and recovery from occurrence of events. The third of these metrics takes into consideration the concept of affordances that allows a common representation for the opportunities of action between the automated system and its environment.