Opinion: Supervised autonomy in robotics must be designed for the robot's worst day

Plus One Robotics CEO Erik Nieves argues that robots should be judged by their "worst day" rather than by smooth demonstrations, that is, by how they perform when facing situations they have never seen. The article advocates inventorying an exception list before deployment, defining the boundary between what the robot can handle on its own and what it must escalate, and having help requests carry information such as on-site images, number of attempts, and confidence. Nieves expects supervised autonomy to be the main shift in the next five years, and the ratio of supervisors to robots should be determined based on pilot data.