Situated Autonomy

Abstract

Our interest in autonomy is grounded in the context of an agent, a situation, and a goal. We limit our view of autonomy to an agent’s moment-to-moment action selection instead of a long-lived agent characteristic. Autonomy of an agent maps an agent, a situation, and a goal to a stance towards the goal such that the stance will be used to generate the most appropriate or the most relevant action for the agent [3]. At a coarse level the agent’s stance towards the goal will be whether to abandon it or to decide its overall position toward the goal: to make it an entirely personal goal, to make a goal for another agent, to collaborate with other agents with some level of responsibility, or to have some responsibility about it that is less than total responsibility. Responsibility for a goal is the amount of effort an agent is willing to spend on seeing to its accomplishment. At a finer level the agent’s stance will go beyond an overall position to include a degree of autonomy.