Evaluation of Impression Difference of a Domestic Mobile Manipulator with Autonomous and/or Remote Control in Fetch-and-Carry Tasks

TL;DR

This study evaluates how different control modes of a domestic mobile manipulator affect user perceptions during fetch-and-carry tasks, highlighting the impact of agency switching on human-robot interaction.

Contribution

It introduces a formal dual-agency framework and empirically compares user impressions across control modes in a domestic mobile manipulation setting.

Findings

Mode-dependent differences in user affinity and perceived security.

Switching or blending agency influences human impressions.

Empirical guidance for designing human-in-the-loop manipulation.

Abstract

A single service robot can present two distinct agencies: its onboard autonomy and an operator-mediated agency, yet users experience them through one physical body. We formalize this dual-agency structure as a User-Robot-Operator triad in an autonomous remote-control setting that integrates teleoperation with autonomous execution and human-in-the-loop remote assistance. Prior to the recent surge of language-based and multimodal interfaces, we developed and evaluated an early-stage prototype in 2020 that combined natural-language text chat with a sketch-based interface enabling freehand on-image annotation over the robot's live camera view to support remote intervention. We evaluated three modes - remote control via teleoperation, autonomous control, and autonomous remote control (a hybrid mode representing different levels of autonomy) - in controlled fetch-and-carry mobile manipulation tasks using a domestic mobile manipulator, the Human Support Robot (HSR), on a World Robot Summit 2020 rule-compliant test field. The results show systematic mode-dependent differences in user-rated affinity and perceived security, indicating that switching or blending agency within one robot measurably shapes human impressions in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). These findings provide empirical guidance for designing human-in-the-loop mobile manipulation in domestic physical tasks.