Toward Trustworthy Adjustable Autonomy in KAoS

Trust is arguably the most crucial aspect of agent acceptability. At its simplest level, it can be characterized in terms of judgments that people make concerning three factors: an agent's competence, its benevolence, and the degree to which it can be rapidly and reliably brought into compliance when things go wrong. Adjustable autonomy consists of the ability to dynamically impose and modify constraints that affect the range of actions that the human-agent team can successfully perform, consistently allowing the highest degrees of useful autonomy while maintaining an acceptable level of trust. Many aspects of adjustable autonomy can be addressed through policy. Policies are a means to dynamically regulate the behavior of system components without changing code or requiring the cooperation of the components being governed. By changing policies, a system can be adjusted to accommodate variations in externally imposed constraints and environmental conditions. In this paper we describe some important dimensions relating to autonomy and give examples of how these dimensions might be adjusted in order to enhance performance of human-agent teams. We introduce Kaa (KAoS adjustable autonomy) and provide a brief comparison with two other implementations of adjustable autonomy concepts.