Simultaneous human and autonomous control with constrained human action

An approach to the control of an autonomous process with human supervision is presented. The process is modelled as a discrete event system which allows for human intervention. For effective control, the autonomous system should control most of the process, with the human only interfering in an unmodelled situation. This shared control must therefore allow the human to influence the autonomous system as well as allowing the autonomous system to “influence” the human. The autonomous process can influence the human by constraining the human input. We present a method by which these constraints are not only used to restrict the human but also to control the autonomous process. The validity of the proposed method of using constraints to generate velocity control commands as well as restricting the human input is demonstrated by experiments. The experiments are implemented using the Eshed Scorbot VII