Low-Moral Actions by Malicious Anonymous Operators of Avatar Robots

Imagine a world where people use robots to visit different places and countries. Unlike screens on wheels (telepresence robots), avatar robots can look like anything. One flaw of this is that it is not readily apparent to bystanders who the operator of the robot is. Malicious operators can use this anonymity to do low-moral actions, which we define as not only illegal acts but also acts that violate norms of society.

We looked at what low-moral actions were possible and what prevention mechanisms were applicable for each. We identified four categories and 15 subcategories of malicious acts that can be done when a robot is limited to locomotor movement and video feed from the robot’s eyes to the operator only. Before the workshops, participants experienced avatar robots by controlling both a simulated avatar and a real avatar as a malicious anonymous operator in a variety of situations. They also experienced sharing space with an avatar controlled by a malicious anonymous operator.

This was my master’s research at the Human-Robot Interaction Lab at Kyoto University. A manuscript based on this work is under review at the ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (Shaheen et al., 2024). I also presented two poster presentations based on this work.