Semi-Autonomous Systems with Contextual Competence Awareness

Competence modeling is critical for the efficient and safe operation of semi-autonomous systems (SAS) with varying levels of autonomy. In this paper, we extend the notion of competence modeling by introducing a contextual competence model. While previous work on competence-aware systems (CAS) defined the competence of a SAS relative to a single static operator, we present an augmented operator model that is contextualized by Markovian state information capable of capturing multiple operators. Access to such information allows the SAS to account for the stochastic shifts that may occur in the behavior of the operator(s) during deployment and optimize its autonomy accordingly. We show that the extended model called Contextual Competence Aware System (CoCAS) has the same convergence guarantees as CAS, and empirically illustrate the benefit of our approach over both the original CAS model as well as other relevant work in shared autonomy.