Failing Gracefully: Mitigating Impact of Inevitable Robot Failures

2026-08-05

AI Summary

This work addresses the safety risks posed by hardware or software failures and unintended interactions in domestic service robots. To mitigate these hazards, the authors propose a novel safety modeling approach that jointly quantifies both the likelihood of fault occurrence and the severity of its consequences—a first in this domain. They further develop FailBench, a MuJoCo-based simulation framework, to systematically evaluate robot behavioral safety across diverse failure modes. The proposed method enables safety-aware motion planning and policy learning, significantly enhancing decision robustness without compromising task efficiency. This integrated framework lays a critical foundation for the reliable deployment of service robots in home environments.

Abstract

Service robots operate in household environments shared with humans, pets, and everyday objects, where they are highly susceptible to failures such as software crashes, hardware degradation, or unpredictable interactions. While roboticists strive to minimize failures, some remain inevitable, making it critical to mitigate their potential consequences for safe and reliable deployment. This paper introduces a novel safety formulation that evaluates both the probability of impactful interactions between robots and surrounding entities during failures, and the severity of their outcomes. By quantifying the impact of failures on different entities, our approach enables robots to make informed planning decisions that balance safety with task efficiency. To support systematic evaluation, we also present FailBench, a MuJoCo-based simulation framework for studying robot-environment interactions under diverse failure modes, including sensing issues and actuator malfunctions. Together, our safety formulation and FailBench provide a foundation for developing safer and more robust motion plans and learned policies in real-world household environments.

Problem

• robot failures
• safety mitigation
• impact assessment
• household environments
• failure consequences

Innovation

• failure mitigation
• safety formulation
• impact severity
• FailBench
• robot-environment interaction