“When to Take the Lead?” Mediation of Motion Intention in Collaborative Avatar Manipulation

Controlling a single robotic arm or virtual avatar with multi-users has been shown to not only enhance the stability of manipulation but also to promote motor learning among users with varying skill levels. However, it remains unclear how users coordinate their intentions and resolve conflicts in real-time, under shared control conditions with multiple movement options. To elucidate this process, we conducted a user study in which two participants jointly operated a single robotic arm to perform a reaching task involving obstacle avoidance. The results revealed that participants did not simply rely on individual strategies when working in pairs, but instead adopted approaches specifically tailored to two-person interactions. Furthermore, the leader-follower roles were not fixed throughout the task but dynamically switched between participants at important moments in the decision-making process. For many participants, we observed a “Mediation Cliff” at 4 cm of robotic arm movement, where conflicting intentions were reconciled during joint operation. Subjective rating and interviews also revealed that participants frequently experienced ambiguity in their motor intentions and sense of controllability. The present study emphasizes the importance of preventing uncontrollable situations and advocates for the role of computer in mediating user intentions and facilitating decision-making during joint actions.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  NASA/ESA Conference on Adaptive Hardware and Systems

• Publication date

  2025-03-16

• Fields of study

  Computer Science, Engineering, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1145/3745900.3746072
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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