Backdoors in Learning-Based Industrial Robotic Arm Manipulation: An Empirical Security Study

Abstract

Learning-based models (e.g., visuomotor and Vision-Language-Action (VLA)) are increasingly explored for industrial robotic manipulation, where model predictions are directly translated into physical actions. This tight coupling between model behavior and physical execution makes hidden security vulnerabilities particularly consequential. While backdoor attacks have been widely studied in conventional AI models, their effects on deployed learning-based robotic arm manipulation systems remain less understood: a backdoored robot can behave normally during benign operation while inducing attacker-specified behaviors only when specific triggers are present, posing potentially serious risks in physical environments. In this work, we present a preliminary empirical security study of backdoor attacks and defenses in learning-based robotic manipulation on two real commercial industrial robotic arms (FANUC and xArm). We investigate whether a backdoor can reliably induce semantically incorrect manipulation behaviors while remaining stealthy under nominal task execution. We then develop an online defense pipeline that detects and neutralizes triggers at runtime, and compare its effectiveness against an offline fine-tuning defense. Beyond defense effectiveness, we further evaluate the computational latency and execution overhead introduced by the defense pipeline to assess its suitability for high-throughput industrial operation.