Development and Evaluation of Exploratory Experiences to Facilitate Reasoning About Robotic Systems

Sogol Balali, Marisa Hudspeth, Ian Afflerbach, Hannah Helgesen, Jessica McCurry, Walid Abu Al-Afia, Kelton Bruslind, Kathryn Hays, Ross T. Sowell, Ruth West, Cindy M. Grimm

Abstract: This paper introduces a novel interactive approach —Exploratory Experiences— that aims to improve the ability of people to reason about the capabilities and limitations of robotic technology. We focus on two areas: robot navigation and object detection. We evaluate the Exploratory Experiences with a novel approach that measures the participant's ability to predict when the robot will fail, following up with asking the reason and a possible fix. We show that our approach is effective at improving participants' understanding of potential robot navigation failures and that they already have the skills to detect potential object detection failures when presented with the correct stimuli.