# Maintaining the Sense of Agency in Semi-Autonomous Robot Conferencing
## 3 Related Work
### Semi-Autonomous Robot  
There are many teleoperation methods available to control a humanoid robot [16]. In the method focusing on social telepresence, a robot reproduces the body motions of the operator using master-slave teleoperation, and a head-mounted device reproduces the audio and visual information that are transmitted by a binaural microphone and a stereo camera [17]. The purpose of this method is to make the operator feel as if the robot body is their own by reproducing its body motion and the sensations as accurately as possible. Therefore, this method is not suitable for the incorporation of autonomous  
Figure 1: Experimental setup of the operator and remote sides.  
behavior. Thus, we developed the semi-autonomous teleoperation system that guides the teleoperation (i.e., operator's eye movement) according to autonomous behavior.  
Several studies have already proposed semi-autonomous systems. The first study involved the development of a handcart-type robot that supported walking motion for elderly people. The results of the experiment reported that the user can obtain a sense of handcart control by adjusting the autonomy of the robot to the walking ability of the user [18]. A study involving teleoperated robots developed a system that allows for autonomous robots to attend to a task, but also allows for an operator to step in and control the robots when they face a difficult problem [19]. This system intends for a small number of operators to control a large number of robots to provide services simultaneously. In this case, the social telepresence and the sense of agency may be not so important. Furthermore, semi-autonomous systems have been proposed for the automatic avoidance of obstacles in the teleoperation of a mobile robot [20], the reduction of an operator's effort in robot-assisted therapy [21], and the adjustment of the differences of movements between an operator and a robot caused by differences in their physicality [22]. These studies have not clarified whether the proposed semi-autonomous systems can maintain the social telepresence and sense of agency. In addition, in the teleoperation of a humanoid robot, the reproduction of physiological movements (e.g., respiration and body oscillation) are typically autonomously reproduced [23], because reproducing such small involuntary movements seems not to be effective for the sense of agency.  
As described above, it has been hardly reported heretofore that the sense of agency is maintained, even if a conscious movement related to a conversation is autonomously reproduced. A recent study proposed a semi-autonomous system avoiding collisions between teleoperation and autonomous behaviors so as to reduce the frustration of an operator as a result of the collisions [24]. This previous study is closely related to ours, but the approach to avoiding the collisions is different. While it adjusts the priority of autonomous behaviors according to teleoperation, our study guides teleoperation according to the autonomous behavior. The approach of the previous study may not contribute to the sense of agency, because the execution of the autonomous behavior is clear to the operator.  
In this study, we adopted an autonomous behavioral pattern in which a robot pays attention to the face of a speaker. This action is performed so as to simulate the social behavior that is consciously performed in multi-party conversations. We investigated whether our proposed interface, which guides the operator's eye movement, provides the operator with the illusion that they are continuing controlling the robot.