Enhancing Video-Based Robot Failure Detection Using Task Knowledge

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Thoduka, Santosh, Houben, Sebastian, Gall, Juergen, Plöger, Paul G.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Thoduka, Santosh
Houben, Sebastian
Gall, Juergen
Plöger, Paul G.
author_facet Thoduka, Santosh
Houben, Sebastian
Gall, Juergen
Plöger, Paul G.
contents Robust robotic task execution hinges on the reliable detection of execution failures in order to trigger safe operation modes, recovery strategies, or task replanning. However, many failure detection methods struggle to provide meaningful performance when applied to a variety of real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a video-based failure detection approach that uses spatio-temporal knowledge in the form of the actions the robot performs and task-relevant objects within the field of view. Both pieces of information are available in most robotic scenarios and can thus be readily obtained. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on three datasets that we amend, in part, with additional annotations of the aforementioned task-relevant knowledge. In light of the results, we also propose a data augmentation method that improves performance by applying variable frame rates to different parts of the video. We observe an improvement from 77.9 to 80.0 in F1 score on the ARMBench dataset without additional computational expense and an additional increase to 81.4 with test-time augmentation. The results emphasize the importance of spatio-temporal information during failure detection and suggest further investigation of suitable heuristics in future implementations. Code and annotations are available.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_18705
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Enhancing Video-Based Robot Failure Detection Using Task Knowledge
Thoduka, Santosh
Houben, Sebastian
Gall, Juergen
Plöger, Paul G.
Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robust robotic task execution hinges on the reliable detection of execution failures in order to trigger safe operation modes, recovery strategies, or task replanning. However, many failure detection methods struggle to provide meaningful performance when applied to a variety of real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a video-based failure detection approach that uses spatio-temporal knowledge in the form of the actions the robot performs and task-relevant objects within the field of view. Both pieces of information are available in most robotic scenarios and can thus be readily obtained. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on three datasets that we amend, in part, with additional annotations of the aforementioned task-relevant knowledge. In light of the results, we also propose a data augmentation method that improves performance by applying variable frame rates to different parts of the video. We observe an improvement from 77.9 to 80.0 in F1 score on the ARMBench dataset without additional computational expense and an additional increase to 81.4 with test-time augmentation. The results emphasize the importance of spatio-temporal information during failure detection and suggest further investigation of suitable heuristics in future implementations. Code and annotations are available.
title Enhancing Video-Based Robot Failure Detection Using Task Knowledge
topic Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18705