The Sense of Agency in Assistive Robotics Using Shared Autonomy

TL;DR

This paper investigates how shared autonomy in assistive robotics affects users' sense of agency and task performance, revealing a trade-off where increased autonomy improves task success but reduces perceived control.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on the relationship between robot autonomy, task performance, and sense of agency in assistive robotics, and proposes a potential real-time monitoring metric.

Findings

Higher robot autonomy improves task performance.

Increased autonomy decreases users' sense of agency.

A proxy metric for sense of agency is proposed.

Abstract

Sense of agency is one factor that influences people's preferences for robot assistance and a phenomenon from cognitive science that represents the experience of control over one's environment. However, in assistive robotics literature, we often see paradigms that optimize measures like task success and cognitive load, rather than sense of agency. In fact, prior work has found that participants sometimes express a preference for paradigms, such as direct teleoperation, which do not perform well with those other metrics but give more control to the user. In this work, we focus on a subset of assistance paradigms for manipulation called shared autonomy in which the system combines control signals from the user and the automated control. We run a study to evaluate sense of agency and show that higher robot autonomy during assistance leads to improved task performance but a decreased sense of agency, indicating a potential trade-off between task performance and sense of agency. From our findings, we discuss the relation between sense of agency and optimality, and we consider a proxy metric for a component of sense of agency which might enable us to build systems that monitor and maintain sense of agency in real time.