Explain Yourself: A Natural Language Interface for Scrutable Autonomous Robots
This addresses transparency issues for operators of autonomous systems in remote locations, but it is incremental as it builds on existing explanation methods.
The paper tackles the problem of explaining autonomous robot behavior to maintain trust by developing a natural language chat interface that allows users to query vehicle actions, using expert-provided explanations to create an interpretable model.
Autonomous systems in remote locations have a high degree of autonomy and there is a need to explain what they are doing and why in order to increase transparency and maintain trust. Here, we describe a natural language chat interface that enables vehicle behaviour to be queried by the user. We obtain an interpretable model of autonomy through having an expert 'speak out-loud' and provide explanations during a mission. This approach is agnostic to the type of autonomy model and as expert and operator are from the same user-group, we predict that these explanations will align well with the operator's mental model, increase transparency and assist with operator training.