Explain Yourself: A Natural Language Interface for Scrutable Autonomous Robots

Autonomous systems in remote locations have a high degree of autonomy and there is a need to explain what they are doing and why in order to increase transparency and maintain trust. Here, we describe a natural language chat interface that enables vehicle behaviour to be queried by the user. We obtain an interpretable model of autonomy through having an expert 'speak out-loud' and provide explanations during a mission. This approach is agnostic to the type of autonomy model and as expert and operator are from the same user-group, we predict that these explanations will align well with the operator's mental model, increase transparency and assist with operator training.