The influence of autonomy of a teleoperated robot on user's objective and subjective performance

This article describes a study investigating the effects of decision-making autonomy of a robot, which is teleoperated in a simulated unstable or dangerous environment. It specifically focuses on robot’s autonomy to disregard the user’s command if the robot finds an alternative method of achieving the same goal as pursued by the user, but with significantly reduced risk of failure. Such autonomous control module might prove especially useful under circumstances where human operators cannot access or process all available information quickly enough to make the most optimal decision. We conducted an experiment in which subjects participated in a task of teleoperating either a robot that possesses such autonomous cognitive module, or not. We found that such module significantly reduced their sense of agency over the robot as well as the sense of doing the task together with the robot (sense of joint agency). Most interestingly, it reduced their subjective ratings of performance in the task, when in fact their actual performance was better with such an autonomous robot. A further analysis revealed that this counterintuitive finding was due to an effect of bias: in our study loss of control associated with operating an autonomous robot on average lowered the reported subjective performance by 11% points, with other factors staying equal. These results suggest that this type of assistive autonomy can be beneficial for performance, but might lead to unwanted effects that need to be overcome in order for such system to prove useful in practical applications.