Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2610.40199

Decision-Level Error Attribution and Depth-Aware Safety Evaluation of Monocular RGB Human Tracking for Autonomous Robot Navigation

Abdulahi Taiwo·Chijioke Cyriacus Ekechi
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Monocular RGB tracking is useful for robots operating near people, but perception errors affect binary stop/proceed decisions in ways that geometric accuracy metrics do not capture. We examine how much decision error arises from the safety rule versus perception. We prove that lateral-only distance is a lower bound on planar distance: with accurate positions, it cannot miss dangers identified by the planar rule, but it produces unnecessary stops. We introduce a two-factor Shapley attribution separating rule and perception contributions, and further distinguish missed detections from localization errors. Experiments use ETH and UCY pedestrian videos with simulated stationary robots, disjoint calibration and evaluation pedestrians, and time-block bootstrap intervals. Across 898 pedestrians in three scenes, the lateral rule missed no dangers on annotated positions but achieved only 5.6-31.9% stop precision. In two scenes with RGB perception, calibrated ground-plane localization achieved 0.59 m and 0.51 m planar RMSE, compared with 1.72 m and 1.39 m for a geometric baseline and 0.81 m and 0.68 m for calibrated Depth Anything V2. Detection recall of 0.43 and 0.26 made missed detections the leading source of missed danger. A two-standard-deviation safety margin with ground-plane localization matched or improved on the lateral rule's missed-danger rate in all eight scene-threshold settings and reduced unnecessary stops in seven. All robot interactions are simulated, and outcomes are offline decision classifications, not demonstrations of collision avoidance.

Explore related subjects

cs.ROcs.CV

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Abdulahi Taiwo, Chijioke Cyriacus Ekechi. 2026-10-29. Decision-Level Error Attribution and Depth-Aware Safety Evaluation of Monocular RGB Human Tracking for Autonomous Robot Navigation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40199

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Aligned Delta-Triplane Transformers as Occupancy World Models

Occupancy World Models (OWMs) aim to predict future 3D occupancy scenes from historical observations and future ego motions, providing a useful world simulation tool for autonomous driving. Existing methods usually rely on large networks to implicitly align multi-frame historical states and predict future occupancy in a full-state manner, which is costly and redundant because most scene regions remain unchanged over short time intervals. In this paper, we propose Aligned Delta-Triplane Transformer (ADTT), a compact 4D OWM that explicitly aligns historical triplanes with ego-motion compensation and predicts only future scene changes. Based on the aligned triplane prior, a query-conditioned Transformer predicts residual changes, where ego-motion queries guide controllable future motion and learnable external queries capture scene changes beyond ego motion. The predicted changes are added to the aligned prior and decoded into future occupancy scenes. Experiments on Occ3D-nus show that ADTT achieves state-of-the-art forecasting performance with fewer parameters and higher FPS. Our code is publicly available online: https://github.com/kyoran/ADTT.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

OmniVIC: A Self-Improving Variable Impedance Controller with Vision-Language In-Context Learning for Safe Robotic Manipulation

We present OmniVIC, a universal variable impedance controller (VIC) enhanced by a vision language model (VLM), which improves safety and adaptation in any contact-rich robotic manipulation task to enhance safe physical interaction. Traditional VIC have shown advantages when the robot physically interacts with the environment, but lack generalization in unseen, complex, and unstructured safe interactions in universal task scenarios involving contact or uncertainty. To this end, the proposed OmniVIC interprets task context derived reasoning from images and natural language and generates adaptive impedance parameters for a VIC controller. Specifically, the core of OmniVIC is a self-improving Retrieval-Augmented Generation(RAG) and in-context learning (ICL), where RAG retrieves relevant prior experiences from a structured memory bank to inform the controller about similar past tasks, and ICL leverages these retrieved examples and the prompt of current task to query the VLM for generating context-aware and adaptive impedance parameters for the current manipulation scenario. Therefore, a self-improved RAG and ICL guarantee OmniVIC works in universal task scenarios. The impedance parameter regulation is further informed by real-time force/torque feedback to ensure interaction forces remain within safe thresholds. We demonstrate that our method outperforms baselines on a suite of complex contact-rich tasks, both in simulation and on real-world robotic tasks, with improved success rates and reduced force violations. OmniVIC takes a step towards bridging high-level semantic reasoning and low-level compliant control, enabling safer and more generalizable manipulation. Overall, the average success rate increases from 27% (baseline) to 61.4% (OmniVIC).

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Safe Learning for Contact-Rich Robot Tasks: A Survey from Classical Learning-Based Methods to Safe Foundation Models

Contact-rich tasks pose significant challenges for robotic systems due to inherent uncertainty, complex dynamics, and the high risk of damage during interaction. Recent advances in learning-based control have shown great potential in enabling robots to acquire and generalize complex manipulation skills in such environments, but ensuring safety, both during exploration and execution, remains a critical bottleneck for reliable real-world deployment. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of safe learning-based methods for robot contact-rich tasks. We categorize existing approaches into two main domains: safe exploration and safe execution. We review key techniques, including constrained reinforcement learning, risk-sensitive optimization, uncertainty-aware modeling, control barrier functions, and model predictive safety shields, and highlight how these methods incorporate prior knowledge, task structure, and online adaptation to balance safety and efficiency. A particular emphasis of this survey is on how these safe learning principles extend to and interact with emerging robotic foundation models, especially vision-language models (VLMs) and vision-language-action models (VLAs), which unify perception, language, and control for contact-rich manipulation. We discuss both the new safety opportunities enabled by VLM/VLA-based methods, such as language-level specification of constraints and multimodal grounding of safety signals, and the amplified risks and evaluation challenges they introduce. Finally, we outline current limitations and promising future directions toward deploying reliable, safety-aligned, and foundation-model-enabled robots in complex contact-rich environments. More details and materials are available at our \href{ https://github.com/jack-sherman01/Awesome-Learning4Safe-Contact-rich-tasks}{Project GitHub Repository}.

cs.RO↗