Agent-based human robot interaction in a supervised autonomous system

In human supervised autonomously controlled systems the human operator should concentrate attention on tasks, which need high skills and leave to the computer yet complex processes, which can be done autonomously. It is crucial to let the operator have a complete control over his tool by enabling him maximum freedom to make changes in the robot behavior as response to specific environments or events. A model based on a mixture of hybrid and behavior based systems enables human operator intervention at all levels of the control hierarchy. This paper deals about how this human intervention should be applied. For human intervention at the low layers of the control hierarchy of RCS, where the control bandwidth is extremely high, a software entity, known as agent, which acts in the purpose of the human operator, will take care of the fluent transition between the state in which the robot operates and the one imposed by the human. This agent will be a task oriented control agent. For layers, with lower control bandwidth, the agent serves as an intelligent interface, which may restrict the less experienced operator from catastrophic intervention with the system activity. In such a case, the human operator should have the choice to completely switch off this feature.