Robot Pouring: Identifying Causes of Spillage and Selecting Alternative Action Parameters Using Probabilistic Actual Causation
In everyday life, we perform tasks (e.g., cooking or cleaning) that involve a large variety of objects and goals. When confronted with an unexpected or unwanted outcome, we take corrective actions and try again until achieving the desired result. The reasoning performed to identify a cause of the observed outcome and to select an appropriate corrective action is a crucial aspect of human reasoning for successful task execution. Central to this reasoning is the assumption that a factor is responsible for producing the observed outcome. In this paper, we investigate the use of probabilistic actual causation to determine whether a factor is the cause of an observed undesired outcome. Furthermore, we show how the actual causation probabilities can be used to find alternative actions to change the outcome. We apply the probabilistic actual causation analysis to a robot pouring task. When spillage occurs, the analysis indicates whether a task parameter is the cause and how it should be changed to avoid spillage. The analysis requires a causal graph of the task and the corresponding conditional probability distributions. To fulfill these requirements, we perform a complete causal modeling procedure (i.e., task analysis, definition of variables, determination of the causal graph structure, and estimation of conditional probability distributions) using data from a realistic simulation of the robot pouring task, covering a large combinatorial space of task parameters. Based on the results, we discuss the implications of the variables' representation and how the alternative actions suggested by the actual causation analysis would compare to the alternative solutions proposed by a human observer. The practical use of the analysis of probabilistic actual causation to select alternative action parameters is demonstrated.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
GRITS: A Spillage-Aware Guided Diffusion Policy for Robot Food Scooping Tasks
Robotic food scooping is a critical manipulation skill for food preparation and service robots. However, existing robot learning algorithms, especially learn-from-demonstration methods, still struggle to handle diverse a…
Explainable Hierarchical Imitation Learning for Robotic Drink Pouring
To accurately pour drinks into various containers is an essential skill for service robots. However, drink pouring is a dynamic process and difficult to model. Traditional deep imitation learning techniques for implement…
Action GenerationDecision MakingGeneral KnowledgeImitation LearningRobust Robotic Pouring using Audition and Haptics
Robust and accurate estimation of liquid height lies as an essential part of pouring tasks for service robots. However, vision-based methods often fail in occluded conditions while audio-based methods cannot work well in…
Visual Closed-Loop Control for Pouring Liquids
Pouring a specific amount of liquid is a challenging task. In this paper we develop methods for robots to use visual feedback to perform closed-loop control for pouring liquids. We propose both a model-based and a model-…
RadarEye: Robust Liquid Level Tracking Using mmWave Radar in Robotic Pouring
Transparent liquid manipulation in robotic pouring remains challenging for perception systems: specular/refraction effects and lighting variability degrade visual cues, undermining reliable level estimation. To address t…