# Maintaining the Sense of Agency in Semi-Autonomous Robot Conferencing
## 8 Conclusions  
This study aimed to provide an operator with the illusion that the autonomous behavior of a robot is directed by their teleoperation in semi-autonomous robot conferencing. For this purpose, we developed an interface that allows an operator to control the gaze of a robot using their eye movement.  
The interface guides the operator's eye movement toward the autonomous gaze movement of a robot. Because human eyes move voluntarily and involuntarily, we expected that the operator would believe that the guided eye movement is actually their own involuntary eye movement, and feel that they are continuing the teleoperation, regardless of the interruption of the autonomous gaze movement.  
As a result of the experiment, in which subjects performed robot conferencing through our interface, we found several conditions under which to provide the illusion. (1) When mixing the autonomous behavior into the teleoperation, and (2) when the autonomous behavior is acceptable for the operator, the visual guidance facilitates the illusion. (3) However, visual guidance could not work when the robot autonomously moves at all times. The illusion makes the operator hardly notice the autonomous behavior, and therefore the sense of agency and social telepresence are maintained.  
We also confirmed the possibility that replacing teleoperation with autonomous behavior decreases the cognitive load of the operator with regard to social behavior. Therefore, the operator could focus on the speech of the partner. This effect is obtained in the conversation through a full-autonomous robot, but not in semi-autonomous robot conferencing.  
For these findings, we considered that adjusting the autonomy of the robot according to the intentions of the operator would improve the usefulness of semi-autonomous robot conferencing. The semi-autonomous state will be used so that the operator can behave more socially while obtaining the sense of agency and social telepresence, and it will be changed to the fully autonomous state when the operator wants to focus on listening to their partner. This idea might be also applied to when adding task oriented autonomous behaviors. In the case of a lecturer robot, the teleoperation interface detects students who are interested and/or bored with the lecture, and guides the gaze of the remote lecturer to pay attention to them without decreasing the sense of agency and social telepresence. If the lecturer needs to listen to and evaluate the presentation of a student, the full autonomous listening behaviors of the robot would be useful for decreasing the cognitive load of the lecturer.  
This study argues the possibility that adopting autonomous behaviors to a teleoperated robot by our proposed method increases its usefulness, without decreasing its original benefits. We hope that this study diminishes the distance between the social robotics and telerobotics fields, and facilitates in the study of semi-autonomous robot conferencing.  
Conceptualization, K.O., Y.Y., S.N., and H.I.; data curation, K.T. ([PERSON]); funding acquisition, K.O., Y.Y., and H.L.; investigation, K.T. ([PERSON]) and K.T. ([PERSON]); methodology, K.T. ([PERSON]), K.O., Y.Y., and H.I.; project administration, Y.Y. and H.I.; resources, K.O., Y.Y., and H.I.; software, K.T. ([PERSON]) and K.T. ([PERSON]); supervision, H.I.; validation, K.T. ([PERSON]); visualization, K.T. ([PERSON]); writing (original draft), K.T. ([PERSON]) and K.T. ([PERSON]).  
This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI, grant number JP25220004.  
We thank [PERSON] and [PERSON] for helping the experiment of this study.  
The authors declare no conflict of interest.