Effect of Agency to Teleoperated Communication Robot by Semi-autonomous Nod

Teleoperation enables us to act in remote location through operated entities such as robots or virtual agents. This advantage allows us to work in places dangerous for humans or places not designed for humans such as in volcano disaster site or in narrow maintenance pipes. However, teleoperation also has a weakness, namely, several gaps (operation interface, environment, appearance, and intentionality) among ourselves and the teleoperated entities in remote. As teleoperated robots own physical bodies different from us, teleoperation requires special interfacing systems that are usually not so intuitive. Such a system requires rather long period of training for one to become familiar with it. One possible solution for this issue is to implement semi-autonomous teleoperation (SAT) facility which combines manual operation and autonomous action. With SAT, we can teleoperate remote entities in a way suitable to the teleoperated entity and to the situation in remote with the help of autonomous action. However, there is a concern that this autonomous part of SAT may decrease operators' feeling of agency and consequently, operators may lose concentration and become less efficient. To deal with this issue, we made a hypothesis that if an autonomously generated action is sufficiently suitable to the situation, operators would feel their own agency to the generated action. In this paper, we examined this hypothesis through an experiment where participants joined a conversation using a teleoperated android robot. Here we focused on autonomous generation of nodding act and evaluated operators' agency toward the generated actions. Participants listened to a speech through the teleoperated robot with different degree of autonomous motion generation. After a series of listening, they watched video recordings taken from the speaker's view that showed the teleoperated robot in action, and evaluated their agency toward the action and the appropriateness of robot's motion toward the speaker. As a result, we found that as timing of nodding become appropriate to the conversation context, the operators kept agency to robot's motion, even when the automatically generated motion and the operator's own motion were mixed. Furthermore, the robot motion which was automatically generated was evaluated more appropriate to the conversation than the operator's own motion. In conclusion, when using semi-autonomous teleoperation, if the autonomous action is appropriate to the situation, ope