Designing Human-Centered Autonomous Agents

Human-centered automation (HCA) maximizes the goals of humans by supporting a full range of interactions between humans and autonomous systems. The key goal of this research is to minimize the necessity for human interaction, but maximize the capability to interact. Within HCA we de ne adjustable autonomy as the ability of autonomous systems to operate with dynamically varying levels of independence, intelligence and control. HCA encompasses adjustable autonomy and interfaces it with Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). The motivations for human-centered automation are many. They include technical issues such as an inability to automate certain aspects of a task because of its complexity or because of an uncertain or changing operating environment. They also include non-technical issues such as a desire to allow for human intervention even when full autonomy is possible. These latter motivations may include safety, training, maintenance or calibration. The bene ts of human-centered automation include the ability to partially automate a system when full automation is not possible. Other bene ts are lower costs because diÆcult-to-automate parts of the system can be left to humans and increased operator acceptance of an autonomous system. Early work in human-centered autonomous systems has been conducted at NASA Johnson Space Center [2, 4], at NASA Ames Research Center [3], at the Honeywell Technology Center [5] and the University of Texas [1].