Variable autonomy through responsible robotics: Design guidelines and research agenda

Reinmund, Tyler; Salvini, Pericle; Kunze, Lars; Jirotka, Marina; Winfield, Alan F.T.

Abstract

Physically embodied artificial agents, or robots, are being incorporated into various practical and social contexts, from self-driving cars for personal transportation to assistive robotics in social care. To enable these systems to better perform under changing conditions, designers have proposed to endow robots with varying degrees of autonomous capabilities and the capacity to move between them-an approach known as variable autonomy. Researchers are beginning to understand how robots with fixed autonomous capabilities influence a person's sense of autonomy, social relations, and, as a result, notions of responsibility; however, addressing these topics in scenarios where robot autonomy dynamically changes is underexplored. To establish a research agenda for variable autonomy that emphasises the responsible design and use of robotics, we conduct a developmental review. Based on a sample of 42 papers, we provide a synthesised definition of variable autonomy to connect currently disjointed research efforts, detail research approaches in variable autonomy to strengthen the empirical basis for subsequent work, characterise the dimensions of variable autonomy, and present design guidelines for variable autonomy research based on responsible robotics.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Nov 9, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Jan 30, 2024
• Publication Date: Mar 31, 2024
• Deposit Date: Dec 15, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 1, 2024
• Journal: ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction
• Electronic ISSN: 2573-9522
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 13
• Issue: 1
• Article Number: 7
• Pages: 1-36
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3636432
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Human-Computer Interaction
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/11517878
• Publisher URL: https://dl.acm.org/toc/thri/2024/13/1
• Additional Information: Received: 2022-10-10; Accepted: 2023-11-09; Published: 2023-12-07