User Study Exploring the Role of Explanation of Failures by Robots in Human Robot Collaboration Tasks

Abstract: Despite great advances in what robots can do, they still experience failures in human-robot collaborative tasks due to high randomness in unstructured human environments. Moreover, a human's unfamiliarity with a robot and its abilities can cause such failures to repeat. This makes the ability to failure explanation very important for a robot. In this work, we describe a user study that incorporated different robotic failures in a human-robot collaboration (HRC) task aimed at filling a shelf. We included different types of failures and repeated occurrences of such failures in a prolonged interaction between humans and robots. The failure resolution involved human intervention in form of human-robot bidirectional handovers. Through such studies, we aim to test different explanation types and explanation progression in the interaction and record humans.