Explainable Goal-Driven Agents and Robots- A Comprehensive Review and New Framework

Recent applications of autonomous agents and robots, for example, self-driving cars, scenario-based trainers, exploration robots, service robots, have brought attention to crucial trust-related problems associated with the current generation of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. AI systems particularly dominated by the connectionist deep learning neural network approach lack capabilities of explaining their decisions and actions to others, despite their great successes. They are fundamentally non-intuitive black boxes, which renders their decision or actions opaque, making it difficult to trust them in safety-critical applications. The recent stance on the explainability of AI systems has witnessed several works on eXplainable Artificial Intelligence; however, most of the studies have focused on data-driven XAI systems applied in computational sciences. Studies addressing the increasingly pervasive goal-driven agents and robots are still missing. This paper reviews works on explainable goal-driven intelligent agents and robots, focusing on techniques for explaining and communicating agents perceptual functions (for example, senses, vision, etc.) and cognitive reasoning (for example, beliefs, desires, intention, plans, and goals) with humans in the loop. The review highlights key strategies that emphasize transparency and understandability, and continual learning for explainability. Finally, the paper presents requirements for explainability and suggests a roadmap for the possible realization of effective goal-driven explainable agents and robots