Perceived Autonomy of Robots: Effects of Appearance and Context
conference paper
Due to advances in technology, the world around us contains an increasing number of robots, intelligent virtual agents, and other intelligent systems. These systems all have a certain degree of autonomy. For the people who interact with an intelligent system 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 paper we therefore present a study on how system characteristics affect people’s perception of an intelligent system’s autonomy. This was investigated by asking fire-fighters to rate the perceived autonomy 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: time interval of interaction, obedience, informativeness, task complexity, task implication, physical appearance, and physical distance to human operator. The study showed that increased disobedience, task complexity, human-likeness and physical distance of a robot can increase perceived autonomy.
Topics
TNO Identifier
574979
Source title
International Conference on Robot Ethics, October 23 & 24 2015, Lisbon, Portugal
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