From Shared Control to Symbiosis: A Conflict-Aware Pre-Symbiotic Arbitration Model

Human-machine symbiosis is a meta pattern of dynamic interactions between humans and machines, characterized by a subjective oneness between the human and the machine and a high degree of alignment in physically coupled shared control. Reaching and maintaining this symbiotic state is challenging because conflicts can arise from mismatched objectives, internal models, goals, and control actions. Therefore, this paper focuses on pre-symbiotic arbitration: a mediator algorithm is proposed that identifies and resolves conflicts in order to facilitate the transition toward the symbiotic state. We formalize symbiotic state, conflict state, and arbitration, and propose a pattern handler capturing directional opposition and effort mismatch between human and automation inputs. Using this pattern handler, we introduce a conflict-aware mediator model in which automation can arbitrate by goal yielding of its reference to adapt toward the human reference. In a simulation study using 2-DOF shared navigation with goal mismatch, we show that the proposed pattern handler can successfully model the goal mismatch. In addition, the conflict-aware mediator algorithm can resolve this conflict by arbitration of the automation goal, which leads to convergence of the human and the automation goals.