Probabilistic failure isolation for cognitive robots

Robots may encounter undesirable outcomes due to failures during the execution of their plans in the physical world. Failures should be detected, and the underlying reasons should be found by the robot in order to handle these failure situations efficiently. Sometimes, there may be more than one cause of a failure, and they are not necessarily related to the action in execution. In this paper, we propose a temporal and Hierarchical Hidden Markov Model (HHMM) based failure isolation method. These HHMMs run in parallel to determine causes of unexpected deviations. Experiments on our Pioneer 3-AT robot show that our method successfully isolates failures suggesting possible causes.