Towards a Holistic Framework for Explainable Robot Navigation

With the rising tendency to deploy autonomous robots, their navigational decisions will strongly influence humans. Robot navigation should be explainable to mitigate the undesirable effects of navigation faults and unexpectedness on people. To contribute to compliance between humans and autonomous robots, we present HiXRoN (Hierarchical eXplainable Robot Navigation)—a comprehensive hierarchical framework for explaining robot navigational choices. Besides providing explanations of robot navigation, our framework encompasses qualitative, quantitative, and temporal strategies for explanation conveyance. We further discuss its possibilities and limitations.