Who is in charge? Sense of control and robot anxiety in Human-Robot Interaction

Abstract

In the late 1990s, the question of control was raised in the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) community within the process of designing computer interfaces. Following in their footsteps, the question of how much people want to be in control of their robots and how it affects the way we should design robotic interfaces is explored. To investigate the subject, we conducted a study which involved two fully autonomously operating mobile robots, namely a multi-purpose companion robot and a single-purpose domestic robot. The purpose of the study was to evaluate participants' sense of control (perceived control -who they felt was in charge of the robots- and desired control -how they wanted the action to be executed-) for a common domestic task: cleaning. Unexpectedly, the results show the higher the participants' desired control was, the more autonomous they wanted the companion robot to be (meaning the robot executed the needed task without an explicit permission from the participants).