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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. 

In this paper, a hybrid Lagrangian–Eulerian topology optimization (LETO) method is proposed to solve the elastic force equilibrium with the Material Point Method (MPM). LETO transfers density information from freely movable Lagrangian carrier particles to a fixed set of Eulerian quadrature points. This transfer is based on a smooth radial kernel involved in the compliance objective to avoid the artificial checkerboard pattern. The quadrature points act as MPM particles embedded in a lower‐resolution grid and enable a subcell multidensity resolution of intricate structures with a reduced computational cost. A quadrature‐level connectivity graph‐based method is adopted to avoid the artificial checkerboard issues commonly existing in multiresolution topology optimization methods. Numerical experiments are provided to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach.