Reliability-aware Execution Gating for Near-field and Off-axis Vision-guided Robotic Alignment

2026-02-09

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of execution failure in vision-guided robotic manipulation during near-field off-axis alignment tasks, where minor pose estimation errors are often amplified by system kinematics. To mitigate this issue, the authors propose a reliability-aware execution gating mechanism that dynamically rejects or scales high-risk pose updates at the execution layer. This approach leverages geometric consistency analysis and configuration-based risk assessment, operating independently of any specific pose estimation algorithm. The method is compatible with both classical and learning-based pose estimators and demonstrates significant improvements on a UR5 platform: it substantially increases task success rates, reduces execution variance, and suppresses tail-end risks, all while preserving baseline average pose accuracy.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: State Estimation
• Computer Vision: Biometrics, Face, Gesture & Pose
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Replanning and Plan Repair

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web learning to rank, online learning, and counterfactual learning for ranking

Abstract

Vision-guided robotic systems are increasingly deployed in precision alignment tasks that require reliable execution under near-field and off-axis configurations. While recent advances in pose estimation have significantly improved numerical accuracy, practical robotic systems still suffer from frequent execution failures even when pose estimates appear accurate. This gap suggests that pose accuracy alone is insufficient to guarantee execution-level reliability. In this paper, we reveal that such failures arise from a deterministic geometric error amplification mechanism, in which small pose estimation errors are magnified through system structure and motion execution, leading to unstable or failed alignment. Rather than modifying pose estimation algorithms, we propose a Reliability-aware Execution Gating mechanism that operates at the execution level. The proposed approach evaluates geometric consistency and configuration risk before execution, and selectively rejects or scales high-risk pose updates. We validate the proposed method on a real UR5 robotic platform performing single-step visual alignment tasks under varying camera-target distances and off-axis configurations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed execution gating significantly improves task success rates, reduces execution variance, and suppresses tail-risk behavior, while leaving average pose accuracy largely unchanged. Importantly, the proposed mechanism is estimator-agnostic and can be readily integrated with both classical geometry-based and learning-based pose estimation pipelines. These results highlight the importance of execution-level reliability modeling and provide a practical solution for improving robustness in near-field vision-guided robotic systems.

Problem

• reliability
• vision-guided robotics
• pose estimation
• execution failure
• geometric error amplification

Innovation

• Reliability-aware Execution Gating
• geometric error amplification
• vision-guided robotic alignment
• execution-level reliability
• pose estimation robustness