Teammate-pattern-aware autonomy based on organizational self-design principles

We describe an approach for constraining robot autonomy based on the robot’s awareness of patterns of its human teammates’ behaviors, rather than either ignoring its teammates (which is fast but dangerous) or inferring their plans (which is safer but slow). We explore the promise, and limitations, of this approach in a series of simulated problems where an unmanned ground vehicle and its human teammates must rapidly respond to a sudden context shift. Our results help us discern conditions under which a pattern-aware approach can be more effective than the alternatives, and our current efforts investigate how the manned–unmanned team can adopt biases to more readily establish such conditions that are more favorable to the pattern-aware approach.