Utilising Explanations to Mitigate Robot Conversational Failures

TL;DR

This paper reviews how robot explanations can help detect and mitigate conversational failures in humanoid robots, emphasizing their role in improving interaction robustness in real-world settings.

Contribution

It provides an overview of failure detection and explanation strategies in human-robot interaction, highlighting opportunities for integrating explainability to enhance robot communication.

Findings

Failures can be used as opportunities for robot explanations.

Explanations improve robot legibility and user understanding.

Potential for combining HRI and explainability research.

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of robot failure detection work from HRI and adjacent fields using failures as an opportunity to examine robot explanation behaviours. As humanoid robots remain experimental tools in the early 2020s, interactions with robots are situated overwhelmingly in controlled environments, typically studying various interactional phenomena. Such interactions suffer from real-world and large-scale experimentation and tend to ignore the 'imperfectness' of the everyday user. Robot explanations can be used to approach and mitigate failures, by expressing robot legibility and incapability, and within the perspective of common-ground. In this paper, I discuss how failures present opportunities for explanations in interactive conversational robots and what the potentials are for the intersection of HRI and explainability research.