Investigating the Relationship Between Connection, Agency and Autonomy for Controlling a Robot Arm for Remote Social Physical Interaction

Current telecommunication systems such as Skype cannot allow remote users to interact physically. Thus, we propose installing a robot arm and teleoperating it can realize social physical interaction. Some autonomy may be necessary to realize easy teleoperation because teleoperation requires mental workload. However, too much autonomy can decrease sense of agency, which may cause lack of connection because remote users do not feel they caused actions. Thus, in this study, we investigate the relationship between autonomy level and sense of connection of a remote person with local area and people. We focus on pushing tasks because pushing is one of the major functions in hand and arm use. Sense of agency can be categorized into the Feeling of agency (FOA) which is not conceptual and the Judgement of agency (JOA) which is conceptual. Therefore, we conducted user studies to investigate whether FOA associated with control of trajectories and joint angles affects the sense of connection. The results suggested that higher autonomy could decrease telepresence, and remote users preferred controlling joint angles for fun, but they did not need FOA for performance.