RAPT: Model-Predictive Out-of-Distribution Detection and Failure Diagnosis for Sim-to-Real Humanoid Robots

TL;DR

RAPT is a lightweight, self-supervised monitoring system for humanoid robots that detects out-of-distribution states and failures in real-time, providing interpretable diagnostics to improve safety and reliability during deployment.

Contribution

The paper introduces RAPT, a novel probabilistic, self-supervised OOD detection method with an automated root-cause analysis pipeline for humanoid robots, enhancing detection accuracy and interpretability.

Findings

Improves TPR by 37% in simulation at 0.5% false positive rate.

Achieves 12.5% TPR improvement on real robots.

Provides 75% accuracy in root-cause classification.

Abstract

Deploying learned control policies on humanoid robots is challenging: policies that appear robust in simulation can execute confidently in out-of-distribution (OOD) states after Sim-to-Real transfer, leading to silent failures that risk hardware damage. Although anomaly detection can mitigate these failures, prior methods are often incompatible with high-rate control, poorly calibrated at the extremely low false-positive rates required for practical deployment, or operate as black boxes that provide a binary stop signal without explaining why the robot drifted from nominal behavior. We present RAPT, a lightweight, self-supervised deployment-time monitor for 50Hz humanoid control. RAPT learns a probabilistic spatio-temporal manifold of nominal execution from simulation and evaluates execution-time predictive deviation as a calibrated, per-dimension signal. This yields (i) reliable online OOD detection under strict false-positive constraints and (ii) a continuous, interpretable measure of Sim-to-Real mismatch that can be tracked over time to quantify how far deployment has drifted from training. Beyond detection, we introduce an automated post-hoc root-cause analysis pipeline that combines gradient-based temporal saliency derived from RAPT's reconstruction objective with LLM-based reasoning conditioned on saliency and joint kinematics to produce semantic failure diagnoses in a zero-shot setting. We evaluate RAPT on a Unitree G1 humanoid across four complex tasks in simulation and on physical hardware. In large-scale simulation, RAPT improves True Positive Rate (TPR) by 37% over the strongest baseline at a fixed episode-level false positive rate of 0.5%. On real-world deployments, RAPT achieves a 12.5% TPR improvement and provides actionable interpretability, reaching 75% root-cause classification accuracy across 16 real-world failures using only proprioceptive data.