Managing Concurrent Activities of Humans and Software Agents
Debra L. Schreckenghost, Peter Bonasso, Cheryl English Martin, David Kortenkamp · 2004
*† ‡ § For future manned space exploration, it will be necessary for humans, robots, and autonomous software agents to work together in an often harsh environment with constrained resources. Such concurrent distributed multi-human multi-agent operations will require accommodation by agents to prevent interference with others. We are integrating two complementary approaches for managing the concurrent activities of humans and software agents. The first approach is to automatically generate a plan that coordinates the activities of humans and autonomous agents. The second approach is to provide command and authorization services that prevent activities not in this plan from interfering. Both of these approaches are enabled by providing agents that support adjusting their level of control autonomy as a means of preventing commands from interfering. We have demonstrated both approaches for controlling crew life support systems at NASA Johnson Space Center. In this paper we describe these approaches for managing concurrent activities of humans and agents, and illustrate them with examples from our work with crew life support systems at NASA Johnson Space Center.