Reasons People Want Explanations After Unrecoverable Pre-Handover Failures

TL;DR

This paper investigates why humans seek explanations after unrecoverable failures in robot handovers, emphasizing the importance of explanations over non-verbal cues and user control in trust restoration.

Contribution

It provides insights into human expectations for explanations in failed robot handovers, highlighting their role in trust and interaction adjustments.

Findings

Participants prefer explanations over non-verbal cues after failure.

People expect to modify requests based on explanations.

Explanations help restore trust after unrecoverable failures.

Abstract

Most research on human-robot handovers focuses on the development of comfortable and efficient HRI; few have studied handover failures. If a failure occurs in the beginning of the interaction, it prevents the whole handover process and destroys trust. Here we analyze the underlying reasons why people want explanations in a handover scenario where a robot cannot possess the object. Results suggest that participants set expectations on their request and that a robot should provide explanations rather than non-verbal cues after failing. Participants also expect that their handover request can be done by a robot, and, if not, would like to be able to fix the robot or change the request based on the provided explanations.