We recently published “A Taxonomy of Robot Autonomy for Human-Robot Interaction” in collaboration with the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) lab at the University of Chicago. The project, which drew on robotics, philosophy, and other fields to enrich the notion of robot autonomy, was led by Stephanie Kim (HRI lab) and coauthored by Sarah Sebo (HRI lab) and Jacy Reese Anthis (SI). The paper was published in the Proceedings of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) and received an Honorable Mention award.
Abstract
Robot autonomy is an influential and ubiquitous factor in human-robot interaction (HRI), but it is rarely discussed beyond a one-dimensional measure of the degree to which a robot operates without human intervention. As robots become more sophisticated, this simple view of autonomy could be expanded to capture the variety of autonomous behaviors robots can exhibit and to match the rich literature on human autonomy in philosophy, psychology, and other fields. In this paper, we conduct a systematic literature review of robot autonomy in HRI and integrate this with the broader literature into a taxonomy of six distinct forms of autonomy: those based on robot and human involvement at runtime (operational autonomy, intentional autonomy, shared autonomy), human involvement before runtime (non-deterministic autonomy), and expressions of autonomy at runtime (cognitive autonomy, physical autonomy). We discuss future considerations for autonomy in HRI that emerge from this study, including moral consequences, the idealization of "full" robot autonomy, and connections to agency and free will.
Open access publication in HRI: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610977.3634993