Group decision-making in robot teleoperation: two heads are better than one

Conference item

Operators working with robots in safety-critical domains have to make decisions under uncertainty, which remains a challenging problem for a single human operator. An open question is whether two human operators can make better decisions jointly, as compared to a single operator alone. While prior work has shown that two heads are better than one, such studies have been mostly limited to static and passive tasks. We investigate joint decision-making in a dynamic task involving humans teleoperating robots. We conduct a humansubject experiment with N = 100 participants where each participant performed a navigation task with two mobiles robots in simulation. We find that joint decision-making through confidence sharing improves dyad performance beyond the betterperforming individual (p < 0.0001). Further, we find that the extent of this benefit is regulated both by the skill level of each individual, as well as how well-calibrated their confidence estimates are. Finally, we present findings on characterising the human-human dyad’s confidence calibration based on the individuals constituting the dyad. Our findings demonstrate for the first time that two heads are better than one, even on a spatiotemporal task which includes active operator control of robots.

Authors: Nguyen, A; Bhattacharyya, R; Colombatto, C; Fleming, S; Posner, I

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery
• Pages: 489 - 500
• Publication date: 2025-03-04
• Acceptance date: 2024-12-03
• Event title: IEEE/ACM International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2025)
• Event location: Melbourne, Australia
• Event website: https://humanrobotinteraction.org/2025/
• Event start date: 2025-03-04
• Event end date: 2025-03-06
• DOI: 10.5555/3721488.3721550
• Language: English
• Keywords: human-robot interaction; joint decision-making; teleoperation