Paper ID: 2303.16010

User Study Exploring the Role of Explanation of Failures by Robots in Human Robot Collaboration Tasks

Parag Khanna, Elmira Yadollahi, Mårten Björkman, Iolanda Leite, Christian Smith

Despite great advances in what robots can do, they still experience failures in human-robot collaborative tasks due to high randomness in unstructured human environments. Moreover, a human's unfamiliarity with a robot and its abilities can cause such failures to repeat. This makes the ability to failure explanation very important for a robot. In this work, we describe a user study that incorporated different robotic failures in a human-robot collaboration (HRC) task aimed at filling a shelf. We included different types of failures and repeated occurrences of such failures in a prolonged interaction between humans and robots. The failure resolution involved human intervention in form of human-robot bidirectional handovers. Through such studies, we aim to test different explanation types and explanation progression in the interaction and record humans.

Submitted: Mar 28, 2023