Title | Improving Robot Controller Transparency Through Autonomous Policy Explanation |
Publication Type | Conference Proceedings |
Year of Conference | 2017 |
Authors | Hayes, B., and J. A. Shah |
Conference Name | ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI) |
Date Published | 03/2017 |
Abstract | Shared expectations and mutual understanding are critical facets of teamwork. Achieving these in human-robot collaborative contexts can be especially challenging, as humans and robots are unlikely to share a common language to convey intentions, plans, or justifications. Even in cases where human co-workers can inspect a robot’s control code, and particularly when statistical methods are used to encode control policies, there is no guarantee that meaningful insights into a robot’s behavior can be derived or that a human will be able to efficiently isolate the behaviors relevant to the interaction. We present a series of algorithms and an accompanying system that enables robots to autonomously synthesize policy descriptions and respond to both general and targeted queries by human collaborators. We demonstrate applicability to a variety of robot controller types including those that utilize conditional logic, tabular reinforcement learning, and deep reinforcement learning, synthesizing informative policy descriptions for collaborators and facilitating fault diagnosis by non-experts. |
URL | http://interactive.mit.edu/sites/default/files/documents/hayes-hri17.pdf |
DOI | 10.1145/2909824.3020233 |