Proactive Anomaly Detection for Robot Navigation with Multi-Sensor Fusion

TL;DR

This paper introduces PAAD, a proactive anomaly detection network for robot navigation that predicts future failures using multi-sensor fusion, enabling early alerts and improving robustness in unstructured environments.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel proactive anomaly detection approach that predicts failures before they occur, utilizing multi-sensor data fusion for enhanced robustness in real-world scenarios.

Findings

Outperforms previous methods in failure detection accuracy

Effective in real-time anomaly prediction with low false alarms

Robust to sensor occlusion in cluttered environments

Abstract

Despite the rapid advancement of navigation algorithms, mobile robots often produce anomalous behaviors that can lead to navigation failures. The ability to detect such anomalous behaviors is a key component in modern robots to achieve high-levels of autonomy. Reactive anomaly detection methods identify anomalous task executions based on the current robot state and thus lack the ability to alert the robot before an actual failure occurs. Such an alert delay is undesirable due to the potential damage to both the robot and the surrounding objects. We propose a proactive anomaly detection network (PAAD) for robot navigation in unstructured and uncertain environments. PAAD predicts the probability of future failure based on the planned motions from the predictive controller and the current observation from the perception module. Multi-sensor signals are fused effectively to provide robust anomaly detection in the presence of sensor occlusion as seen in field environments. Our experiments on field robot data demonstrates superior failure identification performance than previous methods, and that our model can capture anomalous behaviors in real-time while maintaining a low false detection rate in cluttered fields. Code, dataset, and video are available at https://github.com/tianchenji/PAAD