SHARPA: Shared Autonomy via Robust Task Planning and Argumentation

The overarching objective of the project is to endow autonomous systems with advanced decision-making capabilities and collaboration skills. It aims to build artificial systems that, in real-world environments, are capable of reasoning about high-level goals specified by human operators and formulating, in collaboration with them, a course of actions to successfully achieve such goals.

Strategic reasoning and fluid teaming are fundamental skills of cognitive systems: they are needed in a variety of situations, from day-to-day tasks such as assisting humans in household chores, to extreme missions, such as space exploration. The techniques that we propose are general and can be used to support both robotic systems and software agents. We choose disaster response operations where unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) assist emergency responders as our demonstration arena. In this domain, in fact, it is crucial for the UAVs to think strategically to pursue goals efficiently and to act in concert with the human operators who are ultimately in charge of critical decisions.

Find out more about Sara's research here.