  This paper presents an overview of robot failure detection work from HRI and
adjacent fields using failures as an opportunity to examine robot explanation
behaviours. As humanoid robots remain experimental tools in the early 2020s,
interactions with robots are situated overwhelmingly in controlled
environments, typically studying various interactional phenomena. Such
interactions suffer from real-world and large-scale experimentation and tend to
ignore the 'imperfectness' of the everyday user. Robot explanations can be used
to approach and mitigate failures, by expressing robot legibility and
incapability, and within the perspective of common-ground. In this paper, I
discuss how failures present opportunities for explanations in interactive
conversational robots and what the potentials are for the intersection of HRI
and explainability research.
