Synergising Human-like Responses and Machine Intelligence for Planning in Disaster Response
This work addresses planning challenges for autonomous agents in disaster response, offering a domain-specific solution that is incremental in nature.
The paper tackles the problem of planning for autonomous agents in rapidly changing disaster response environments by proposing an attention-based cognitive architecture that integrates human-like heuristic responses with machine intelligence planning. The result is a synergistic integration that effectively manages complex tasks by optimizing multiple mission objectives in dynamic environments.
In the rapidly changing environments of disaster response, planning and decision-making for autonomous agents involve complex and interdependent choices. Although recent advancements have improved traditional artificial intelligence (AI) approaches, they often struggle in such settings, particularly when applied to agents operating outside their well-defined training parameters. To address these challenges, we propose an attention-based cognitive architecture inspired by Dual Process Theory (DPT). This framework integrates, in an online fashion, rapid yet heuristic (human-like) responses (System 1) with the slow but optimized planning capabilities of machine intelligence (System 2). We illustrate how a supervisory controller can dynamically determine in real-time the engagement of either system to optimize mission objectives by assessing their performance across a number of distinct attributes. Evaluated for trajectory planning in dynamic environments, our framework demonstrates that this synergistic integration effectively manages complex tasks by optimizing multiple mission objectives.