Performative Autonomy

Tom Williams

twilliams@mines.edu

Interactive intelligent systems are increasingly being deployed in safety critical contexts like Space Exploration. For humans to safely and successfully complete collaborative tasks with robots in these contexts, they must maintain Situational Awareness of their task context without being cognitively overloaded -- regardless of whether they are co-located with robots or interacting with them from a distance of thousands or millions of miles. In previous work, we presented a novel autonomy design strategy we term Performative Autonomy, in which robots behave as if they have a lower level of autonomy than they are truly capable of (i.e., asking for advice they do not believe they truly need), for the sole purpose of maintaining interactants' Situational Awareness. We have demonstrated that Performative Autonomy can increase Situational Awareness (SA) without overly increasing workload, and that this is true across tasks with different baseline levels of Mental Workload. In this project we aim to autonomously determine when and how robots should deploy this strategy.

Grand Challenge: Reverse-engineer the brain.

Rafael Sousa Silva, rsousasilva@mines.edu | Tom Williams, twilliams@mines.edu