"Can you do this?" Self-Assessment Dialogues with Autonomous Robots Before, During, and After a Mission

TL;DR

This paper presents a framework enabling autonomous robots to perform introspection and self-assessment through dialogues before, during, and after missions, enhancing their ability to evaluate capabilities and performance.

Contribution

It introduces a general framework for robot introspection and self-assessment, implemented in the DIARC architecture, with a proof-of-concept on a Nao robot.

Findings

Demonstrated self-assessment capabilities in a Nao robot

Framework supports task and performance dialogues

Enhances robot self-awareness and human-robot interaction

Abstract

Autonomous robots with sophisticated capabilities can make it difficult for human instructors to assess its capabilities and proficiencies. Therefore, it is important future robots have the ability to: introspect on their capabilities and assess their task performance. Introspection allows the robot to determine what it can accomplish and self-assessment allows the robot estimate the likelihood it will accomplish at given task. We introduce a general framework for introspection and self-assessment that enables robots to have task and performance-based dialogues before, during, and after a mission. We then realize aspects of the framework in the cognitive robotic DIARC architecture, and finally show a proof-of-concept demonstration on a Nao robot showing its self-assessment capabilities before, during, and after an instructed task.