Paper Detail

Towards Trustworthy Autonomous Robots: An Explainable AI-Based Decision Framework

Cagri Temel

arxiv Score 11.3

Published 2026-09-02 · First seen 2026-09-03

General AI

Abstract

Autonomous robots powered by deep learning face a fundamental auditability challenge: when incidents occur, investigators cannot reconstruct why the system made specific decisions. This paper presents TRACE (Transparent Reasoning Architecture for Credible Execution), a decision framework that ensures every autonomous action can be traced back to sensor evidence through documented causal chains. The framework organizes decision-making into four auditable layers: Semantic Perception for evidence-grounded entity recognition, Belief Reasoning for probabilistic state estimation with causal graphs, Action Synthesis for constraint-aware planning with counterfactual documentation, and Execution Verification for compliance monitoring. TRACE is model-agnostic yet designed to integrate learning-based perception modules (CNNs, transformers) while preserving decision-level auditability. We evaluate the framework using three objective metrics: Evidence Traceability (sensor-to-decision linkage), Decision Reconstructability (post-hoc analysis capability), and Temporal Continuity (audit trail completeness). Experimental evaluation on warehouse robot navigation demonstrates that TRACE achieves 98.6% evidence traceability, 99.0% temporal continuity, and 98.1% decision reconstructability across 500 simulated decision cycles. Post-hoc methods like LIME provide feature attributions but lack the artifact structure needed for decision-level reconstruction. The framework addresses EU AI Act requirements for high-risk system transparency and contributes to Explainable AI for safety-critical autonomous systems.

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BibTeX

@article{temel2026trustworthy,
  title = {Towards Trustworthy Autonomous Robots: An Explainable AI-Based Decision Framework},
  author = {Cagri Temel},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Autonomous robots powered by deep learning face a fundamental auditability challenge: when incidents occur, investigators cannot reconstruct why the system made specific decisions. This paper presents TRACE (Transparent Reasoning Architecture for Credible Execution), a decision framework that ensures every autonomous action can be traced back to sensor evidence through documented causal chains. The framework organizes decision-making into four auditable layers: Semantic Perception for evidence-g},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02861},
  keywords = {cs.RO, cs.AI},
  eprint = {2609.02861},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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