Explainable Agency by Revealing Suboptimality in Child-Robot Learning Scenarios

Revealing the internal workings of a robot can help a human better understand the robot’s behaviors. How to reveal such workings, e.g., via explanation generation, remains a significant challenge. This gets even more complex when these explanations are targeted towards children. Therefore, we propose a search-based approach to generate contrastive explanations using optimal and sub-optimal plans and implement it in a scenario for children. In the application scenario, the child and the robot learn together how to play a zero-sum game that requires logical and mathematical thinking. We report results around our explanation generation system that was successfully deployed among seven-year-old children. Our results show trends that the generated explanations were able to positively affect the children’s perceived difficulty in learning the zero-sum game.