Decision-theoretic human-robot communication

Humans and robots need to exchange information if the objective is to achieve a task cooperatively. Two questions are considered in this paper: what type of information to communicate, and how to cope with the limited resources of human operators. Decision-theoretic human-robot communication can provide answers to both questions: the type of information is determined by the underlying probabilistic representation, and value-of-information theory helps decide when it is appropriate to query operators for information. A robot navigation task is used to evaluate the system by comparing it to conventional teleoperation. The results of a user study show that the developed system is superior with respect to performance, operator workload, and usability.