Advanced robotic technology is opening up the possibility of integrating robots into the human workspace to improve productivity and decrease the strain of repetitive, arduous physical tasks currently performed by human workers. However, coordinating these teams is a challenging problem. We must understand how decision-making authority over scheduling decisions should be shared between team members and how the preferences of the team members should be included. We report the results of a human-subject experiment investigating how a robotic teammate should best incorporate the preferences of human teammates into the team’s schedule. We find that humans would rather work with a robotic teammate that accounts for their preferences, but this desire might be mitigated if their preferences come at the expense of team efficiency.
