Mixed-initiative variable autonomy for remotely operated mobile robots

Journal article

This article presents an Expert-guided Mixed-initiative Control Switcher (EMICS) for remotely operated mobile robots. The EMICS enables switching between different levels of autonomy during task execution initiated by either the human operator and/or the EMICS. The EMICS is evaluated in two disaster-response-inspired experiments, one with a simulated robot and test arena, and one with a real robot in a realistic environment. Analyses from the two experiments provide evidence that: (a) Human-Initiative (HI) systems outperform systems with single modes of operation, such as pure teleoperation, in navigation tasks; (b) in the context of the simulated robot experiment, Mixed-initiative (MI) systems provide improved performance in navigation tasks, improved operator performance in cognitive demanding secondary tasks, and improved operator workload compared to HI. Last, our experiment on a physical robot provides empirical evidence that identify two major challenges for MI control: (a) the design of context-aware MI control systems; and (b) the conflict for control between the robot’s MI control system and the operator. Insights regarding these challenges are discussed and ways to tackle them are proposed.

Authors: Chiou, M; Hawes, N; Stolkin, R

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery
• Journal: ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction
• Volume: 10
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 1-34
• Article number: 37
• Publication date: 2021-09-02
• Acceptance date: 2021-05-01
• DOI: 10.1145/3472206
• EISSN: 2573-9522
• Language: English
• Keywords: mixed-initiative control; variable autonomy; human-robot interaction; FFR; shared control; conflict for control