Dialogue based Interactive Explanations for Safety Decisions in Human Robot Collaboration

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dialogue-based framework for explaining safety decisions in human-robot collaboration, making safety constraints transparent and understandable through interactive explanations grounded in safety evaluation.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach that couples safety evaluation with explanation dialogue, enabling causal, contrastive, and counterfactual queries about safety decisions in HRC.

Findings

The framework allows users to ask causal, contrastive, and counterfactual questions.

Counterfactual reasoning is bounded to ensure safety guarantees.

The approach is demonstrated in a construction robotics scenario.

Abstract

As robots increasingly operate in shared, safety critical environments, acting safely is no longer sufficient robots must also make their safety decisions intelligible to human collaborators. In human robot collaboration (HRC), behaviours such as stopping or switching modes are often triggered by internal safety constraints that remain opaque to nearby workers. We present a dialogue based framework for interactive explanation of safety decisions in HRC. The approach tightly couples explanation with constraint based safety evaluation, grounding dialogue in the same state and constraint representations that govern behaviour selection. Explanations are derived directly from the recorded decision trace, enabling users to pose causal ("Why?"), contrastive ("Why not?"), and counterfactual ("What if?") queries about safety interventions. Counterfactual reasoning is evaluated in a bounded manner under fixed, certified safety parameters, ensuring that interactive exploration does not relax operational guarantees. We instantiate the framework in a construction robotics scenario and provide a structured operational trace illustrating how constraint aware dialogue clarifies safety interventions and supports coordinated task recovery. By treating explanation as an operational interface to safety control, this work advances a design perspective for interactive, safety aware autonomy in HRC.