Assessment of Bilateral Control Architectures for a Robotic Avatar: Impacts on Operational Performance and the Sense of Agency

Teleoperation of robotic avatars requires bilateral control architectures that are well-suited to human operators. Although several such architectures have been proposed, their appropriateness from the perspectives of both performance and human perception remains unclear. This study compared four bilateral control architectures—position-symmetric (PS), force-reflective (FR), force-feedback (FF), and four-channel (4-ch) systems—implemented in a leader-follower robotic system termed body-unleashed nimble robot for artificial kinesthetics (BUNRAK). Operational performance and the sense of agency (SoA) were experimentally evaluated using a standardized manipulation task. The results showed that FF control afforded superior operational performance and a higher SoA than the other architectures evaluated. Although based on a homogeneous participant group and a single manipulation task, these findings indicate that FF control can provide an effective balance between operational performance and user experience in robotic avatar teleoperation. The results further demonstrate the importance of the SoA as a complementary metric in terms of bilateral teleoperation of robotic avatars.