Perceived autonomy of robots: Effects of appearance and context

Abstract

Due to advances in technology, the world around us contains an increasing number of robots, 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 a system’s characteristics affect people’s perception of its autonomy. This was investigated by asking fire-fighters to rate the 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 and physical distance of a robot can increase perceived autonomy.