Embodiment Envelopes: Calibrating Agency-Constrained Shared Autonomy in VR to Transfer to Wearable Prosthetic Augmentation

How can virtual studies of augmented body parts translate into wearable robotic augmentation with predictable embodiment outcomes? We propose Embodiment Envelopes: user-centered feasible action sets that bound how far shared autonomy may deviate from the user’s inferred intent. The boundary is expressed as an agency budget, τ , applied to a logged Agency Loss Index (ALI). This creates a portable control contract that can be swept in VR, related to ownership, agency, workload, and performance, and then deployed unchanged in a prosthetic or wearable robot. Using an offline NinaPro DB10 benchmark with able-bodied and transradial amputee participants, we show that envelope-constrained arbitration can improve grasp-selection accuracy while keeping ALI low. The paper reframes autonomy level as an auditable human-factors design variable and provides a VR-to-wearable calibration blueprint, reporting schema, and transfer checklist for reproducible augmented-body-part research.