# Maintaining the Sense of Agency in Semi-Autonomous Robot Conferencing
## 1 Introduction  
Previous studies have proposed various robot conferencing methods in which the user speaks to a person using a teleoperated robot [1; 2; 3; 4]. Through the effects of robot conferencing, both the operator of the robot and the conversation partner can feel a greater social telepresence, that is, the sense of being in the same room as the conversation partner [4], than the other remote conferencing media. The physical presence of a robot enhances the sense of talking face-to-face with the operator of the robot [5]. Moreover, the sense of agency (i.e., the feeling that the movement of the robot is the operator's own movement) seems to contribute to the social telepresence. The sense of agency is enhanced when the operator recognizes the synchronization between themselves and the movements of the virtual body [6; 7; 8; 9].  
Unlike videoconferencing, robot conferencing does not transmit the current appearance of the operator. However, this feature is not always a disadvantage. If a robot is used as an avatar, the operator can act like another person who has a different appearance and/or character than the operator. Furthermore, the body motion of the operator can be modified, because it is indirectly transmitted by a robot. For example, if a robot automatically demonstrates polite manners, the operator may be regarded as a polite person by their conversation partner. We call robot conferencing where not only the operator controls the robot, but the robot itself also moves autonomously, a semi-autonomous robot conferencing. However, it is known that the operator of a robot is sensitive for the robot motion that differs from her teleoperation, as a result of delay and direction gap, and such a discomfortteleoperation decreases the sense of agency [8]. This study proposes the method so as to maintain a sense of agency in the semi-autonomous robot conferencing.  
To incorporate autonomous behavior in a teleoperation while maintaining the sense of teleoperation, we considered that blurring the distinction between teleoperation and autonomous behavior is effective. If an operator believes that the autonomous behavior of the robot is as a result of their unconscious teleoperation, they will not notice a difference. Therefore, we focused on an eye movement that moves voluntarily and involuntarily, and developed an interface in which the operator controls the face of the robot using an eye tracker. While an operator controls the robot through the interface, guiding the operator's eye movement (that is, the visual guidance) towards the autonomous head movement of the robot would make them believe that the behavior is their own involuntarily eye movement.  
This paper is organized as follows. The following section describes the interface that allows an operator to remotely control our robot through an eye tracker. The third section presents related work. The fourth section explains our five hypotheses on adding autonomous behavior to teleoperation. The fifth section explains the method we used to examine the hypotheses, along with the experimental settings. The sixth section presents the results, and the seventh section discusses the results. The final section concludes the study.