Affordance-Based Explanations of Robot Navigation

This paper introduces affordance-based explanations of robot navigational decisions. The rationale behind affordance-based explanations draws on the theory of affordances, a principle rooted in ecological psychology that describes potential actions the objects in the environment offer to the robot. We demonstrate how affordances can be incorporated into visual and textual explanations for common robot navigation and path-planning scenarios. Furthermore, we formalize and categorize the concept of affordance-based explanations and connect it to existing explanation types in robotics. We present the results of a user study that shows participants to be, on average, highly satisfied with visual-textual, i.e., multimodal, affordance-based explanations of robot navigation. Furthermore, we investigate the complexity of different types of textual affordance-based explanations. Our research contributes to the expanding domain of explainable robotics, focusing on explaining robot actions in navigation.