"Can you do this?" Self-Assessment Dialogues with Autonomous Robots Before, During, and After a Mission
This addresses the challenge for human instructors in evaluating autonomous robots, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing cognitive architectures.
The paper tackles the problem of human instructors struggling to assess autonomous robots' capabilities by introducing a framework for introspection and self-assessment, enabling robots to engage in dialogues before, during, and after missions, with a proof-of-concept demonstration on a Nao robot.
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.