ContactGuard: Pre-Contact Execution Monitor for Robotic Manipulation
A recent study presents ContactGuard, a pre-contact execution monitoring system aimed at reducing failures in robotic manipulation tasks that involve rich contact, especially in wrist-camera configurations. This innovative system forecasts the immediate outcomes of planned actions in a latent visual space, halting actions if it predicts a likely failure. The latent world model learns from unlabelled robot trajectories to generate compact multi-view visual embeddings, steering clear of pixel-level video predictions. A lightweight failure probe is developed using a small labelled dataset of pre-contact clips. Upon deployment, ContactGuard secures predictions just before a contact event. This research, available on arXiv under ID 2608.13438 and announced as a cross-type submission, addresses a significant gap in current robotic systems, which typically recognize failures only after contact, causing object displacement or disturbance. The proposed approach seeks to enhance the reliability of visuomotor policies in manipulation tasks.
Key facts
- ContactGuard is a pre-contact execution monitor for chunked visuomotor policies.
- It predicts short-horizon consequences in latent visual space and aborts if failure is likely.
- The latent world model is trained from unlabelled robot trajectories.
- It predicts compact multi-view visual embeddings under planned actions, avoiding pixel-level video prediction.
- A lightweight failure probe is trained from a small labelled set of pre-contact clips.
- At deployment, ContactGuard anchors prediction before an imminent contact event.
- The paper is available on arXiv with ID 2608.13438.
- The research addresses failures in wrist-camera setups where poor approaches can push, miss, slip, or disturb objects.
Entities
Institutions
- arXiv