Investigation for measuring and controlling an operator’s sense of operation/direction for a semi-autonomous robot

Abstract

A semi-autonomous robot is becoming important because it can accomplish practical tasks through collaboration between the robot’s autonomy and human operation.However, it is still unclear how a semi-autonomous robot is recognized by its operator who collaborates with it, and understanding this point is critical for application of the robot.For example, the attribution of responsibility for task failure or success may be affected depending on whether an operator treats the robot as a sidekick or a mere tool.In this study, we developed a psychological scale to measure whether an operator feels a sense of operation (tool-likeness) or direction (human-likeness) when they command it.Then, we conducted the experiment to investigate the hypothesis that the degrees of abstractness of the command affect the operator's recognition of a semi-autonomous robot.The results showed that high and low abstractness tended to evoke a sense of direction and operation, respectively.