Automation & Autonomy

Question 1

Differences between automation and autonomy (phisically situated tools)

Answer 1

• Automation: is about physically-situated tools performing highly repetitive, pre-planned actions for well-modeled tasks under the closed world assumption. (e.g. industrial robots).
• Autonomy: is about physically-situated agents who not only perform actions but can also adapt to the open world where the environment and tasks are not known a priori by generating new plans, monitoring and changing plans, and learning within the constraints of their bounded rationality (e.g. Mars rovers).

Question 2

What is a “physically-situated” robot?

Answer 2

Is a robot that can perceive and act on the environment.

Question 3

Closed world assumption

Answer 3

• Everything relevant is known a priori, there are no surprises
• Everything relevant can be completely modeled
• If world is modeled accurately enough, can create stable control loops to respond to all expected situations
• If world is controlled, can minimize or eliminate sensing

Question 4

Engineering the environment (what and when)

Answer 4

What: changing the environment for simplyfing the task.
When: in the closed world assumption we highly engineer the environment because we want to avoid perception.

Question 5

Frame problem

Answer 5

Is the problem of correctly identifying what is unchanging in the world.

Question 6

Open world assumption

Answer 6

Assumption used by autonomous robots.

• the robot may have a model of the world but it is only partially (and unpredictably) correct
• the robot must be able to sense relevant aspects of the world in order to dynamically adapt actions (e.g. act as an intelligent agent)

Question 7

Why does it matter that there is a difference between autonomy and automation?

Answer 7

1. Hardware Design: autonomy requires rich sensing so a
   robot designed for automation is not necessarily able to be used autonomously by just adding software
2. Programming Style: stable control loops vs AI
3. Kind of failures

Question 8

Aspects for solving the problem of autonomy vs automation

Answer 8

Remember the exercize
* execution vs generation
* deterministic vs non-deterministic
* closed-world vs open world
* signals vs symbols