Towards explainable and trustworthy collaborative robots through embodied question answering

Conference item

Collaborative robots (or cobots) will offer significant societal benefits, but their large-scale deployments may also lead to unintended consequences. The ability to query, analyse, and understand data from cobots will be a fundamental requirement for ensuring safety, accountability, and trust. To this end, we propose embodied question answering as a means to enable cobots to explain themselves and make them trustworthy. Our approach is founded in responsible research and innovation and thereby will shape the future of responsible robotics design, development, and deployment for cobots. In this paper, we first provide some background on responsible robotics. Second, we elaborate on the need for explanations. Third, we describe our approach to embodied question answering, and finally, we discuss open challenges before we conclude.

Authors: Kunze, L; Gunes, O; Hillier, D; Munks, M; Webb, H

• Publication status: Accepted
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Acceptance date: 2022-05-13
• Event title: Workshop on collaborative robots and the work of the future @ ICRA 2022
• Event location: Philadelphia, PA, USA
• Event website: https://sites.google.com/view/icra22ws-cor-wotf/home
• Event start date: 2022-05-23
• Event end date: 2022-05-23
• Language: English