Design of fault-tolerant and dependable assistance systems with degree of autonomy adaptation

In this paper, a guideline for designing dependable assistance systems with fault-tolerant control and real-time adaptation of autonomy degree for Human-Machine-Interaction (HMI) with the human in the loop is proposed. The approach models the technical system and its operator symmetrically as dynamical system components, which are decomposed into behavioral levels with different reaction times. The approach is based on a multi-level behavior-based control structure, which is extended to monitoring and fault detection in order to enhance the overall system dependability, to user modeling and to shared human-machine interaction. Methods and techniques used for the implementation of the proposed concept are demonstrated on an air and a ground vehicle.