No Arabic abstract
This record contains the proceedings of the 2020 Workshop on Assessing, Explaining, and Conveying Robot Proficiency for Human-Robot Teaming, which was held in conjunction with the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). This workshop was originally scheduled to occur in Cambridge, UK on March 23, but was moved to a set of online talks due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Human-robot teaming is one of the most important applications of artificial intelligence in the fast-growing field of robotics. For effective teaming, a robot must not only maintain a behavioral model of its human teammates to project the team status, but also be aware that its human teammates expectation of itself. Being aware of the human teammates expectation leads to robot behaviors that better align with human expectation, thus facilitating more efficient and potentially safer teams. Our work addresses the problem of human-robot cooperation with the consideration of such teammate models in sequential domains by leveraging the concept of plan explicability. In plan explicability, however, the human is considered solely as an observer. In this paper, we extend plan explicability to consider interactive settings where human and robot behaviors can influence each other. We term this new measure as Interactive Plan Explicability. We compare the joint plan generated with the consideration of this measure using the fast forward planner (FF) with the plan created by FF without such consideration, as well as the plan created with actual human subjects. Results indicate that the explicability score of plans generated by our algorithm is comparable to the human plan, and better than the plan created by FF without considering the measure, implying that the plans created by our algorithms align better with expected joint plans of the human during execution. This can lead to more efficient collaboration in practice.
We present situated live programming for human-robot collaboration, an approach that enables users with limited programming experience to program collaborative applications for human-robot interaction. Allowing end users, such as shop floor workers, to program collaborative robots themselves would make it easy to retask robots from one process to another, facilitating their adoption by small and medium enterprises. Our approach builds on the paradigm of trigger-action programming (TAP) by allowing end users to create rich interactions through simple trigger-action pairings. It enables end users to iteratively create, edit, and refine a reactive robot program while executing partial programs. This live programming approach enables the user to utilize the task space and objects by incrementally specifying situated trigger-action pairs, substantially lowering the barrier to entry for programming or reprogramming robots for collaboration. We instantiate situated live programming in an authoring system where users can create trigger-action programs by annotating an augmented video feed from the robots perspective and assign robot actions to trigger conditions. We evaluated this system in a study where participants (n = 10) developed robot programs for solving collaborative light-manufacturing tasks. Results showed that users with little programming experience were able to program HRC tasks in an interactive fashion and our situated live programming approach further supported individualized strategies and workflows. We conclude by discussing opportunities and limitations of the proposed approach, our system implementation, and our study and discuss a roadmap for expanding this approach to a broader range of tasks and applications.
Generating explanation to explain its behavior is an essential capability for a robotic teammate. Explanations help human partners better understand the situation and maintain trust of their teammates. Prior work on robot generating explanations focuses on providing the reasoning behind its decision making. These approaches, however, fail to heed the cognitive requirement of understanding an explanation. In other words, while they provide the right explanations from the explainers perspective, the explainee part of the equation is ignored. In this work, we address an important aspect along this direction that contributes to a better understanding of a given explanation, which we refer to as the progressiveness of explanations. A progressive explanation improves understanding by limiting the cognitive effort required at each step of making the explanation. As a result, such explanations are expected to be smoother and hence easier to understand. A general formulation of progressive explanation is presented. Algorithms are provided based on several alternative quantifications of cognitive effort as an explanation is being made, which are evaluated in a standard planning competition domain.
As AI becomes an integral part of our lives, the development of explainable AI, embodied in the decision-making process of an AI or robotic agent, becomes imperative. For a robotic teammate, the ability to generate explanations to justify its behavior is one of the key requirements of explainable agency. Prior work on explanation generation has been focused on supporting the rationale behind the robots decision or behavior. These approaches, however, fail to consider the mental demand for understanding the received explanation. In other words, the human teammate is expected to understand an explanation no matter how much information is presented. In this work, we argue that explanations, especially those of a complex nature, should be made in an online fashion during the execution, which helps spread out the information to be explained and thus reduce the mental workload of humans in highly cognitive demanding tasks. However, a challenge here is that the different parts of an explanation may be dependent on each other, which must be taken into account when generating online explanations. To this end, a general formulation of online explanation generation is presented with three variations satisfying different online properties. The new explanation generation methods are based on a model reconciliation setting introduced in our prior work. We evaluated our methods both with human subjects in a simulated rover domain, using NASA Task Load Index (TLX), and synthetically with ten different problems across two standard IPC domains. Results strongly suggest that our methods generate explanations that are perceived as less cognitively demanding and much preferred over the baselines and are computationally efficient.
We describe a multi-phased Wizard-of-Oz approach to collecting human-robot dialogue in a collaborative search and navigation task. The data is being used to train an initial automated robot dialogue system to support collaborative exploration tasks. In the first phase, a wizard freely typed robot utterances to human participants. For the second phase, this data was used to design a GUI that includes buttons for the most common communications, and templates for communications with varying parameters. Comparison of the data gathered in these phases show that the GUI enabled a faster pace of dialogue while still maintaining high coverage of suitable responses, enabling more efficient targeted data collection, and improvements in natural language understanding using GUI-collected data. As a promising first step towards interactive learning, this work shows that our approach enables the collection of useful training data for navigation-based HRI tasks.