Robots as partners, robots as tools – sense of agency in human-robot teamwork

Agnieszka Wykowska

Italian Institute of Technology

Abstract: As modern technology advances, we are designing increasingly sophisticated tools to support and assist humans. However, it is crucial to not only focus on the technology, but also address the mechanisms of human cognition during the use of the technology. It is those mechanisms that will eventually determine whether the technology is efficacious and well accepted by users.

This talk will focus on robots being designed to assist humans as partners in shared tasks (collaboration partners) or as tools which can be (tele-)operated to perform tasks at a distance (robotic surgery or teleoperation/telepresence). One of the most crucial mechanisms of human cognition that needs to be addressed in all these scenarios is the sense of agency (SoA), namely, the experience of being in control of one’s actions and their consequences. It still remains an open question of how the human user’s SoA is influenced by (i) the context of joint action with a robot; (ii) performing actions by means of the robot effectors. I will present studies where SoA has been studied in a social context of joint action (individual, vicarious and joint SoA) and in the context of robot (tele-) operation. I will discuss the implication of these studies for the fields of social robotics and neuro-engineering (e.g., prosthetics, exoskeletons).

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