Human-robot mutual trust in (Semi)autonomous underwater robots

Abstract

It is envisioned that a human operator is able to monitor and control one or more (semi)autonomous underwater robots simultaneously in future marine operations. To enable such operations, a human operator must trust the capability of a robot to perform tasks autonomously, and the robot must establish its trust to the human operator based on human performance and follow guidance accordingly. Therefore, we seek to i) model the mutual trust between humans and robots (especially (semi)autonomous underwater robots in this chapter), and ii) develop a set of trust-based algorithms to control the human-robot team so that the mutual trust level can be maintained at a desired level. We propose a time series based mutual trust model that takes into account robot performance, human performance and overall human-robot system fault rates. The robot performance model captures the performance evolution of a robot under autonomous mode and teleoperated mode, respectively. Furthermore, we specialize the robot performance model of a YSI EcoMapper autonomous underwater robot based on its distance to a desired waypoint. The human performance model is inspired by the Yerkes-Dodson law in psychology, which describes the relationship between human arousal and performance. Based on the mutual trust model, we first study a simple case of one human operator controlling a single robot and propose a trusttriggered control strategy depending on the limit conditions of the desired trust region. The method is then enhanced for the case of one human operator controlling a swarm of robots. In this framework, a periodic trust-based control strategy with a highest-trust-first scheduling algorithm is proposed. Matlab simulation results are provided to validate the proposed model and control strategies that guarantee effective real-time scheduling of teleoperated and autonomous controls in both one human one underwater robot case and one human multiple underwater robots case.