Which Hand Was Late? Diagnosis for Robot Failure Recovery in Bimanual Tool Use

Engineering notes

Engineering notes will be added by the Robot Papers editorial team.

Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为 VLA、具身智能、人形机器人控制、机器人操作等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

Failure diagnosers for robot manipulation are increasingly vision--language models (VLMs), trained and evaluated on single-arm failures produced by perturbing a successful demonstration. Bimanual tool use adds failures of other kinds: a tool that slips out of its socket while still held, two correct gestures made at different times, and attempts that fail for two reasons at once. On a simulated bimanual tool-use task whose failure causes are read from the recorded trace, we measure what each sensing channel lets a diagnoser tell. The tool's slip is read on the tool hand; which hand was late is read on both arms, while a sensor on one hand reads its own hand's delay and at most part of the other's; and whether a late attempt was also pushed too weakly is not identifiable from passive sensing when the tool hand is late. Within two attempts, a repair policy that escalates when the cause is not identifiable repairs as many failures as one told the true cause. A VLM's internal state carries the late hand almost perfectly, along a direction no closer to the one its answer reads than a random one; whether the answer reports it depends on the wording of the question.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

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