A framework for interaction of distributed autonomous systems and human supervisors

Autonomous systems are rapidly gaining importance in a large number of situations relevant to the general public. By their nature their need for external control is low but still necessary. In this paper we present a framework for interaction of distributed autonomous systems and human supervisors. This framework exploits progress made in a number of related areas and shows that they can be effectively combined into one single framework. To this end it combines an environment for computational steering with virtual reality techniques for visualization and WAP-based communication for ubiquitous intervention. Given the described setup for the technology the current version must be seen as a prototype that shows the feasibility of this approach.