Results in Sliding Autonomy for Multi-robot Spatial Assembly

We have developed a software architecture for teams of robots and humans to jointly perform tightly coordinated tasks, such as assembly of structures in orbit or on plan-etary surfaces. While we envision that robots will au-tonomously perform such work in the future, the state of the art falls short of the capabilities necessary to handle all possible contingencies. Our architecture provides a principled methodology for human involvement to op-timize both task efficiency and robustness by combin-ing robot capability with human intuition. We call such mixed control strategies “sliding autonomy”. Robots ac-complish as many of the tasks as they can autonomously, and human operators take over control to perform those that cannot be easily automated or to provide help whe