Perceived Autonomy of Robots

Abstract

Due to advances in technology, the world around us contains an increasingnumber of robots, virtual agents, and other intelligent systems. These systems allhave a certain degree of autonomy. For the people who interact with an intelligentsystem it is important to obtain a good understanding of its degree of autonomy:what tasks can the system perform autonomously and to what extent? In this paperwe therefore present a study on how a system’s characteristics affect people’s perceptionof its autonomy. This was investigated by asking fire-fighters to rate theautonomy of a number of search and rescue robots in different shapes and situations.In this paper, we identify the following seven aspects of perceived autonomy: timeinterval of interaction, obedience, informativeness, task complexity, task implication,physical appearance, and physical distance to human operator. The study showed thatincreased disobedience, task complexity and physical distance of a robot can increaseperceived autonomy.