A "distance"-based concept of automaton for human-robot interaction

Although supervisory control scenarios have attracted significant research attention for nearly half a century, this general type of automation may not be representative of the next generation of automated or semi-autonomous systems (e.g., mobile-telerobotic systems). Such systems will be developed in the context of teams of people working with teams of robots in dynamic and uncertain environments through many different roles, not limited to supervisory control. There is a need to develop a new general concept of automation for contemporary complex automated systems to model such systems, define the roles of human operators and attempt to explain and predict systems performance. We propose a "distance"-based concept of automation that can be used to describe various forms of human-robot interaction. As the physical distance between a human operator and remote robotic work package increases, there is also an increased likelihood of spatial/temporal perturbations influencing system performance; thus, higher levels of automation are required to deal with such disturbances. This concept can be used to develop a hierarchical representation of complex human-robot interaction scenarios, and to classify various forms of automation in existing human-robot interaction applications.