Managing autonomy in robot teams: Observations from four experiments

It is often desirable for a human to manage multiple robots. Autonomy is required to keep workload within tolerable ranges, and dynamically adapting the type of autonomy may be useful for responding to environment and workload changes. We identify two management styles for managing multiple robots and present results from four experiments that have relevance to dynamic autonomy within these two management styles. These experiments, which involved 80 subjects, suggest that individual and team autonomy benefit from attention management aids, adaptive autonomy, and proper information abstraction.