Reasons People Want Explanations After Unrecoverable Pre-Handover Failures
This addresses the problem of maintaining trust in human-robot interactions after failures, though it is incremental as it builds on existing handover research.
The study investigated why people desire explanations from robots after unrecoverable handover failures, finding that participants expect robots to provide explanations rather than non-verbal cues and want to be able to fix the robot or adjust their requests based on those explanations.
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.