Abstract-Robot introspection, as opposed to anomaly detection typical in process monitoring, helps a robot understand what it is doing at all times. A robot should be able to identify its actions not only when failure or novelty occurs, but also as it executes any number of sub-tasks. As robots continue their quest of functioning in unstructured environments, it is imperative they understand what is it that they are actually doing to render them more robust. This work investigates the modeling ability of Bayesian nonparametric techniques on Markov Switching Process to learn complex dynamics typical in robot contact tasks. We compare the Markov switching process, together with different observation model and the dimensionality of sensor data. The work was tested in a snap assembly task characterized by high elastic forces. The task consists of an insertion subtask with very complex dynamics. Our approach showed a stronger ability to generalize and was able to better model the subtask with complex dynamics in a computationally efficient way. The modeling technique is also used to learn a growing library of robot skills, one that when integrated with low-level control allows for robot online decision making. Supplemental info can be found at [1].

External disturbance forces caused by nonlinear springy electrical cables in the master tool manipulator (MTM) of the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) limits the usage of the existing gravity compensation methods. Significant motion drifts at the MTM tip are often observed when the MTM is located far from its identification trajectory, preventing the usage of these methods for the entire workspace reliably. In this letter, we propose a general and systematic framework to address the problems of the gravity compensation for the MTM of the dVRK. Particularly, high-order polynomial models were used to capture the highly nonlinear disturbance forces and integrated with the multi-step least square estimation framework. This method allows us to identify the parameters of both the gravitational and disturbance forces for each link sequentially, preventing residual error passing among the links of the MTM with uneven mass distribution. A corresponding gravity compensation controller was developed to compensate the gravitational and disturbance forces. The method was validated with extensive experiments in the majority of the manipulator's workspace, showing significant performance enhancements over existing methods. Finally, a deliverable software package in MAT-LAB and C++ was integrated with dVRK and published in the dVRK community for open-source research and development.Index Terms-Medical robots and systems, calibration and identification, surgical robotics: laparoscopy.

Abstract-Robotic failure is all too common in unstructured robot tasks. Despite well-designed controllers, robots often fail due to unexpected events. Robots under a sense-planact paradigm do not have an additional loop to check their actions. In this work, we present a principled methodology to bootstrap online robot introspection for contact tasks. In effect, we seek to enable the robot to recognize and expect its behavior, else detect anomalies. We postulated that noisy wrench data inherently contains patterns that can be effectively represented by a vocabulary. The vocabulary is obtained by segmenting and encoding data. And when wrench information represents a sequence of sub-tasks, the vocabulary represents a set of words or sentence and provides a unique identifier. The grammar, which can also include unexpected events, was classified both offline and online for simulated and real robot experiments. Multi-class Support Vector Machines (SVMs) were used offline, while online probabilistic SVMs were used to give temporal confidence to the introspection result. Our work's contribution is the presentation of a generalizable online semantic scheme that enables a robot to understand its high-level state whether nominal or anomalous. It is shown to work in offline and online scenarios for a particularly challenging contact task: snap assemblies. We perform the snap assembly in one-arm simulated and real one-arm experiments and a simulated twoarm experiment. The data set itself is also fully available online and provides a valuable resource by itself for this type of contact task. Our verification mechanism can be used by highlevel planners or reasoning systems to enable intelligent failure recovery or determine the next most optimal manipulation skill to be used. Supplemental information, code, data, and other supporting documentation can be found at [1].

Robots are increasingly entering uncertain and unstructured environments. Within these, robots are bound to face unexpected external disturbances like accidental human or tool collisions. Robots must develop the capacity to respond to unexpected events. That is not only identifying the sudden anomaly, but also deciding how to handle it. In this work, we contribute a recovery policy that allows a robot to recovery from various anomalous scenarios across different tasks and conditions in a consistent and robust fashion. The system organizes tasks as a sequence of nodes composed of internal modules such as motion generation and introspection. When an introspection module flags an anomaly, the recovery strategy is triggered and reverts the task execution by selecting a target node as a function of a state dependency chart. The new skill allows the robot to overcome the effects of the external disturbance and conclude the task. Our system recovers from accidental human and tool collisions in a number of tasks. Of particular importance is the fact that we test the robustness of the recovery system by triggering anomalies at each node in the task graph showing robust recovery everywhere in the task. We also trigger multiple and repeated anomalies at each of the nodes of the task showing that the recovery system can consistently recover anywhere in the presence of strong and pervasive anomalous conditions. Robust recovery systems will be key enablers for long-term autonomy in robot systems. Supplemental information including videos, code, and result analysis can be found at [1].

Event detection is a critical feature in data-driven systems as it assists with the identification of nominal and anomalous behavior. Event detection is increasingly relevant in robotics as robots operate with greater autonomy in increasingly unstructured environments. In this work, we present an accurate, robust, fast, and versatile measure for skill and anomaly identification. A theoretical proof establishes the link between the derivative of the log-likelihood of the HMM filtered belief state and the latest emission probabilities. The key insight is the inverse relationship in which gradient analysis is used for skill and anomaly identification. Our measure showed better performance across all metrics than all but one related stateof-the-art works. The result is broadly applicable to domains that use HMMs for event detection. Supplemental information, code, data, and videos can be found at [1].