Search for: All records

The ability to provide comprehensive explanations of chosen actions is a hallmark of intelligence. Lack of this ability impedes the general acceptance of AI and robot systems in critical tasks. This paper examines what forms of explanations best foster human trust in machines and proposes a framework in which explanations are generated from both functional and mechanistic perspectives. The robot system learns from human demonstrations to open medicine bottles using (i) an embodied haptic prediction model to extract knowledge from sensory feedback, (ii) a stochastic grammar model induced to capture the compositional structure of a multistep task, and (iii) an improved Earley parsing algorithm to jointly leverage both the haptic and grammar models. The robot system not only shows the ability to learn from human demonstrators but also succeeds in opening new, unseen bottles. Using different forms of explanations generated by the robot system, we conducted a psychological experiment to examine what forms of explanations best foster human trust in the robot. We found that comprehensive and real-time visualizations of the robot’s internal decisions were more effective in promoting human trust than explanations based on summary text descriptions. In addition, forms of explanation that are best suited to foster trust do not necessarily correspond to the model components contributing to the best task performance. This divergence shows a need for the robotics community to integrate model components to enhance both task execution and human trust in machines. 

MAARS (Machine leaning-based Analytics for Automated Rover Systems) is an ongoing JPL effort to bring the latest self-driving technologies to Mars, Moon, and beyond. The ongoing AI revolution here on Earth is finally propagating to the red planet as the High Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) system-on-a-chip (SoC), such as Qualcomm's Snapdragon, become available to rovers. In this three year project, we are developing, implementing, and benchmarking a wide range of autonomy algorithms that would significantly enhance the productivity and safety of planetary rover missions. This paper is to provide the latest snapshot of the project with broad and high-level description of every capability that we are developing, including scientific scene interpretation, vision-based traversability assessment, resource-aware path planning, information-theoretic path planning, on-board strategic path planning, and on-board optimal kinematic settling for accurate collision checking. All of the onboard software capabilities will be integrated into JPL's Athena test rover using ROS (Robot Operating System).