Dependability Levels on Autonomous Systems: The Case Study of a Crisis Management Robot

Professional robots should be endorsed with great autonomy capabilities when designed for release into the market. The need for autonomy is further reinforced when robots are meant to be used for crisis management situations, where close collaboration with humans and trustworthy operation in hazardous environments is necessary. To this end, this article quantifies the system's autonomy by measuring its dependability. This is achieved by defining a qualitative metric system regarding the different levels of dependability that autonomous systems should retain in order to operate in various crisis situations. It provides a detailed analysis of each level of dependability and proposes the minimum requirements that should be fulfilled in each level, thus realizing a ranking system that outlines the overall system's ability to operate autonomously. The proposed analysis is applied on a real robotic prototype developed for crisis situations and evaluates the system's autonomy capabilities by qualitative assessing the levels of dependability it retains.