{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,1,9]],"date-time":"2026-01-09T19:19:02Z","timestamp":1767986342588,"version":"3.49.0"},"reference-count":43,"publisher":"Frontiers Media SA","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2024,1,4]],"date-time":"2024-01-04T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1704326400000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":["frontiersin.org"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["Front. Robot. AI"],"abstract":"<jats:p><jats:bold>Introduction:<\/jats:bold> Human\u2013robot teams are being called upon to accomplish increasingly complex tasks. During execution, the robot may operate at different levels of autonomy (LOAs), ranging from full robotic autonomy to full human control. For any number of reasons, such as changes in the robot\u2019s surroundings due to the complexities of operating in dynamic and uncertain environments, degradation and damage to the robot platform, or changes in tasking, adjusting the LOA during operations may be necessary to achieve desired mission outcomes. Thus, a critical challenge is understanding when and how the autonomy should be adjusted.<\/jats:p><jats:p><jats:bold>Methods:<\/jats:bold> We frame this problem with respect to the robot\u2019s capabilities and limitations, known as robot competency. With this framing, a robot could be granted a level of autonomy in line with its ability to operate with a high degree of competence. First, we propose a Model Quality Assessment metric, which indicates how (un)expected an autonomous robot\u2019s observations are compared to its model predictions. Next, we present an Event-Triggered Generalized Outcome Assessment (ET-GOA) algorithm that uses changes in the Model Quality Assessment above a threshold to selectively execute and report a high-level assessment of the robot\u2019s competency. We validated the Model Quality Assessment metric and the ET-GOA algorithm in both simulated and live robot navigation scenarios.<\/jats:p><jats:p><jats:bold>Results:<\/jats:bold> Our experiments found that the Model Quality Assessment was able to respond to unexpected observations. Additionally, our validation of the full ET-GOA algorithm explored how the computational cost and accuracy of the algorithm was impacted across several Model Quality triggering thresholds and with differing amounts of state perturbations.<\/jats:p><jats:p><jats:bold>Discussion:<\/jats:bold> Our experimental results combined with a human-in-the-loop demonstration show that Event-Triggered Generalized Outcome Assessment algorithm can facilitate informed autonomy-adjustment decisions based on a robot\u2019s task competency.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3389\/frobt.2023.1294533","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2024,1,4]],"date-time":"2024-01-04T04:34:47Z","timestamp":1704342887000},"update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3389\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":5,"title":["Event-triggered robot self-assessment to aid in autonomy adjustment"],"prefix":"10.3389","volume":"10","author":[{"given":"Nicholas","family":"Conlon","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Nisar","family":"Ahmed","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Daniel","family":"Szafir","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]}],"member":"1965","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2024,1,4]]},"reference":[{"key":"B1","first-page":"8211","article-title":"Competency assessment for autonomous agents using deep generative models","author":"Acharya","year":"2022"},{"key":"B2","first-page":"12751","article-title":"Learning to forecast aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties over long horizon trajectories","author":"Acharya","year":"2023"},{"key":"B3","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","DOI":"10.1109\/IROS45743.2020.9340841","article-title":"Self-assessment of grasp affordance transfer","author":"Ard\u00f3n","year":"2020"},{"key":"B4","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"649","DOI":"10.1016\/j.neunet.2009.12.007","article-title":"Of bits and wows: a bayesian theory of surprise with applications to attention","volume":"23","author":"Baldi","year":"2010","journal-title":"Neural Netw."},{"key":"B5","article-title":"Learning to optimize autonomy in competence-aware systems","author":"Basich","year":"2020"},{"key":"B6","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"202","DOI":"10.1177\/0272989X9901900211","article-title":"Relative entropy as a measure of diagnostic information","volume":"19","author":"Benish","year":"1999","journal-title":"Med. Decis. Mak."},{"key":"B7","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"1","DOI":"10.1145\/3472206","article-title":"Mixed-initiative variable autonomy for remotely operated mobile robots","volume":"10","author":"Chiou","year":"2021","journal-title":"J. Hum.-Robot Interact."},{"key":"B8","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","DOI":"10.2514\/6.2022-2496","article-title":"Generalizing competency self-assessment for autonomous vehicles using deep reinforcement learning","author":"Conlon","year":""},{"key":"B9","first-page":"2127","article-title":"\u201cI'm confident this will end poorly\u201d: robot proficiency self-assessment in human-robot teaming","author":"Conlon","year":""},{"key":"B10","article-title":"Investigating the effects of robot proficiency self-assessment on trust and performance","author":"Conlon","year":""},{"key":"B11","first-page":"4614","article-title":"Shared autonomy systems with stochastic operator models","volume-title":"Proceedings of the thirty-first international joint conference on artificial intelligence, IJCAI-22","author":"Costen","year":"2022"},{"key":"B12","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"459","DOI":"10.1007\/s12369-019-00596-x","article-title":"Towards a theory of longitudinal trust calibration in human\u2013robot teams","volume":"12","author":"de Visser","year":"2020","journal-title":"Int. J. Soc. Robotics"},{"key":"B13","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"697","DOI":"10.1016\/s1071-5819(03)00038-7","article-title":"The role of trust in automation reliance","volume":"58","author":"Dzindolet","year":"2003","journal-title":"Int. J. human-computer Stud."},{"key":"B14","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"195","DOI":"10.1007\/978-94-017-2376-3_21","article-title":"Robot as partner: vehicle teleoperation with collaborative control","volume-title":"Multi-robot systems: from swarms to intelligent automata","author":"Fong","year":"2002"},{"key":"B15","volume-title":"Collaborative control: a robot-centric model for vehicle teleoperation","author":"Fong","year":"2001"},{"key":"B16","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"59","DOI":"10.1016\/j.artint.2005.05.007","article-title":"Robot introspection through learned hidden markov models","volume":"170","author":"Fox","year":"2006","journal-title":"Artif. Intell."},{"key":"B17","article-title":"\u201cCan you do this?\u201d Self-assessment dialogues with autonomous robots before, during, and after a mission","author":"Frasca","year":"2020"},{"key":"B18","first-page":"121","article-title":"A method for designing autonomous robots that know their limits","author":"Gautam","year":"2022"},{"key":"B19","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","DOI":"10.1109\/GCWkshps50303.2020.9367549","article-title":"An intelligent edge-based digital twin for robotics","author":"Girletti","year":"2020"},{"key":"B20","article-title":"Recurrent world models facilitate policy evolution","volume-title":"Advances in neural information processing systems","author":"Ha","year":"2018"},{"key":"B21","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"279","DOI":"10.1177\/1541931215591057","article-title":"Representing autonomous systems\u2019 self-confidence through competency boundaries","volume":"59","author":"Hutchins","year":"2015","journal-title":"Proc. Hum. Factors Ergonomics Soc. Annu. Meet."},{"key":"B22","volume-title":"Algorithmic assurances and self-assessment of competency boundaries in autonomous systems","author":"Israelsen","year":"2019"},{"key":"B23","first-page":"213","article-title":"Machine self-confidence in autonomous systems via meta-analysis of decision processes","volume-title":"International conference on applied human factors and ergonomics","author":"Israelsen","year":"2019"},{"key":"B24","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"43","DOI":"10.5898\/JHRI.3.1.Johnson","article-title":"Coactive design: designing support for interdependence in joint activity","volume":"3","author":"Johnson","year":"2014","journal-title":"J. Hum.-Robot Interact."},{"key":"B25","first-page":"2149","article-title":"Design and use paradigms for gazebo, an open-source multi-robot simulator","author":"Koenig","year":"2004"},{"key":"B26","first-page":"1907","article-title":"Introspective black box failure prediction for autonomous driving","author":"Kuhn","year":"2020"},{"key":"B27","volume-title":"Rapidly-exploring random trees: a new tool for path planning","author":"Lavalle","year":"1998"},{"key":"B28","first-page":"689","article-title":"Semi-autonomous systems with contextual competence awareness","author":"Mahmud","year":"2023"},{"key":"B29","volume-title":"Approaches for the computation of generalized self-confidence statements for autonomous vehicles","author":"McGinley","year":"2022"},{"key":"B30","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"737072","DOI":"10.3389\/frai.2021.737072","article-title":"Let me take over: variable autonomy for meaningful human control","volume":"4","author":"Methnani","year":"2021","journal-title":"Front. Artif. Intell."},{"key":"B31","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"39","DOI":"10.5772\/5618","article-title":"Webots: professional mobile robot simulation","volume":"1","author":"Michel","year":"2004","journal-title":"J. Adv. Robotics Syst."},{"key":"B32","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"1","DOI":"10.1561\/2200000086","article-title":"Model-based reinforcement learning: a survey","volume":"16","author":"Moerland","year":"2023","journal-title":"Found. Trends Mach. Learn."},{"key":"B33","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"174","DOI":"10.1016\/j.matpr.2020.06.446","article-title":"A review on simulation in digital twin for aerospace, manufacturing and robotics","volume":"38","author":"Phanden","year":"2021","journal-title":"Mater. Today Proc."},{"key":"B34","article-title":"Os: an open-source robot operating system","volume-title":"Proc. Of the IEEE intl. Conf. On robotics and automation (ICRA)","author":"Quigley","year":"2009"},{"key":"B35","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"303","DOI":"10.1145\/3434074.3447181","article-title":"Robot vitals and robot health: an intuitive approach to quantifying and communicating predicted robot performance degradation in human-robot teams","volume-title":"Companion of the 2021 ACM\/IEEE international conference on human-robot interaction","author":"Ramesh","year":"2021"},{"key":"B36","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"10729","DOI":"10.1109\/LRA.2022.3192612","article-title":"Robot vitals and robot health: towards systematically quantifying runtime performance degradation in robots under adverse conditions","volume":"7","author":"Ramesh","year":"2022","journal-title":"IEEE Robotics Automation Lett."},{"key":"B37","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1","DOI":"10.1145\/2667317.2667330","article-title":"Towards autonomous cars: the effect of autonomy levels on acceptance and user experience","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 6th international conference on automotive user interfaces and interactive vehicular applications","author":"R\u00f6del","year":"2014"},{"key":"B38","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","DOI":"10.1109\/IROS.2017.8206438","article-title":"Online robot introspection via wrench-based action grammars","author":"Rojas","year":"2017"},{"key":"B39","first-page":"7944","article-title":"Chance-constrained motion planning with event-triggered estimation","author":"Theurkauf","year":"2023"},{"key":"B40","volume-title":"Portfolio selection and lower partial moments","author":"Wojt","year":"2009"},{"key":"B41","first-page":"882","article-title":"Robot introspection with bayesian nonparametric vector autoregressive hidden markov models","author":"Wu","year":"2017"},{"key":"B42","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"196","DOI":"10.1016\/j.jmsy.2020.07.013","article-title":"Digital twin-based industrial cloud robotics: framework, control approach and implementation","volume":"58","author":"Xu","year":"2021","journal-title":"J. Manuf. Syst."},{"key":"B43","article-title":"An approximation of surprise index as a measure of confidence","author":"Zagorecki","year":"2015"}],"container-title":["Frontiers in Robotics and AI"],"original-title":[],"link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/www.frontiersin.org\/articles\/10.3389\/frobt.2023.1294533\/full","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2024,1,4]],"date-time":"2024-01-04T04:34:54Z","timestamp":1704342894000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/www.frontiersin.org\/articles\/10.3389\/frobt.2023.1294533\/full"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2024,1,4]]},"references-count":43,"alternative-id":["10.3389\/frobt.2023.1294533"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3389\/frobt.2023.1294533","relation":{},"ISSN":["2296-9144"],"issn-type":[{"value":"2296-9144","type":"electronic"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2024,1,4]]},"article-number":"1294533"}}