Web-based Experiment on Human Performance in Dual-Robot Teleoperation

TL;DR

This study compares human performance in teleoperating single and dual robots in a web-based environment, highlighting the increased difficulty with multiple robots and emphasizing the need for shared autonomy in multi-robot systems.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on human performance bottlenecks in multi-robot teleoperation and underscores the importance of shared autonomy for system efficiency.

Findings

Single human operators struggle more with dual robots

Shared autonomy is necessary for effective multi-robot teleoperation

Web-based experiments effectively simulate robot control tasks

Abstract

In most cases, upgrading from a single-robot system to a multi-robot system comes with increases in system payload and task performance. On the other hand, many multi-robot systems in open environments still rely on teleoperation. Therefore, human performance can be the bottleneck in a teleoperated multi-robot system. Based on this idea, the multi-robot system's shared autonomy and control methods are emerging research areas in open environment robot operations. However, the question remains: how much does the bottleneck of the human agent impact the system performance in a multi-robot system? This research tries to explore the question through the performance comparison of teleoperating a single-robot system and a dual-robot system in a box-pushing task. This robot teleoperation experiment on human agents employs a web-based environment to simulate the robots' two-dimensional movement. The result provides evidence of the hardship for a single human when teleoperating with more than one robot, which indicates the necessity of shared autonomy in multi-robot systems.