Characterizing unmanned system autonomy: contextual autonomous capability and level of autonomy analyses

The Autonomy Levels for Unmanned Systems (ALFUS) workshop series was convened to address the autonomous nature of unmanned, robotic systems, or unmanned systems (UMS). Practitioners have different perceptions or different expectations for these systems. The requirements on human interactions, the types of tasks, the teaming of the UMSs and the humans, and the operating environment are just a few of the issues that need to be clarified. Also needed is a set of definitions and a model with which the autonomous capability of the UMS can be described. This paper reports the current results and status of the ALFUS framework, which practitioners can apply to analyze the autonomy requirements and to evaluate the performance of their robotic programs.