A Semi-Autonomous Reactive Control Architecture

This paper presents a novel intelligent control architecture for semi-autonomous systems. A semi-autonomous system is defined here as that autonomous system (machine) which interacts intelligently with a human user (collaborator) who might command, modify, or override its behavior. This work has been motivated by the need for a control architecture that can interact with human users of different perceptual and cognitive capabilities. A dynamic arbitration layer forms the core of the proposed architecture. Accordingly, the architecture evolves around three main variables: degree of autonomy to reflect the user's capabilities, user's level of confidence in commanding the machine, and strength of conflict between the user's command and the machine's autonomous command. The analogy between this architecture and horseback riding is presented and finally a demonstrative application example of a robotic wheelchair is given.