Intelligent Disobedience and AI Rebel Agents in Assistive Robotics

Abstract

. With the increasing integration of service robots into assistive technologies, there is a need to reason about the boundaries and scope of these robots’ autonomy, such as when they should merely re-act to their environment, when they should make proactive decisions, and when they should override commands. In most existing research, the definition of a “good” assistive robot is one that is compliant with respect to the commands it is given. Two recent papers challenge this perspective, and describe scenarios where a system might choose to rebel against a command or disobey its handler due to a deep understanding of the handler’s intentions. This paper provides a comparative discussion about these two papers and how they together create a more comprehensive framework for assistive robots that can override commands.