Building strong semiautonomous systems

The vision of populating the world with autonomous systems that reduce human labor and improve safety is gradually becoming a reality. Autonomous systems have changed the way space exploration is conducted and are beginning to transform everyday life with a range of household products. In many areas, however, there are considerable barriers to the deployment of fully autonomous systems. We refer to systems that re-quire some degree of human intervention in order to complete a task as semi-autonomous systems. We ex-amine the broad rationale for semi-autonomy and de-fine basic properties of such systems. Accounting for the human in the loop presents a considerable challenge for current planning techniques. We examine various design choices in the development of semi-autonomous systems and their implications on planning and execu-tion. Finally, we discuss fruitful research directions for advancing the science of semi-autonomy