Joint Decision-Making in Robot Teleoperation: When are Two Heads Better Than One?

--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 human-subject 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 better-performing 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. I. INTRODUCTION Human operators are increasingly collaborating with robots via teleoperation in domains such as inspection [32, 10, 15, 16, 18, 69], nuclear decommissioning [55, 17], and search and rescue [13, 21, 46, 54]. In these complex environments, operators are often faced with the decision of choosing which robot or robot controller to operate.