Towards a Theory of Explanations for Human–Robot Collaboration

Abstract

This paper makes two contributions towards enabling a robot to provide explanatory descriptions of its decisions, the underlying knowledge and beliefs, and the experiences that informed these beliefs. First, we present a theory of explanations comprising (i) claims about representing, reasoning with, and learning domain knowledge to support the construction of explanations; (ii) three fundamental axes to characterize explanations; and (iii) a methodology for constructing these explanations. Second, we describe an architecture for robots that implements this theory and supports scalability to complex domains and explanations. We demonstrate the architecture’s capabilities in the context of a simulated robot (a) moving target objects to desired locations or people; or (b) following recipes to bake biscuits.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Sep 23, 2019
Source ID
10.1007/s13218-019-00616-y

Entities

People

  • Ben Meadows
  • Mohan Sridharan

Organizations

  • Air Force Office of Scientific Research
  • Office of Naval Research

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • Business Analytics
  • Systems Analysis and Design

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Autonomous Systems
  • Autonomy
  • Autonomy - Autonomous System Control