Estimating Perceptual Uncertainty to Predict Robust Motion Plans

A typical sense-plan-act robotics pipeline is brittle due to the inherent inaccuracies in the output of the sensing module and the lack of awareness of the planning module to those inaccuracies. This paper develops a framework to predict uncertainty estimates for neural network-based vision models used for state estimation in robotics pipelines. Our uncertainty estimates are based directly on the image observation data and are explicitly trained to model the error distribution on a held-out calibration set. We also demonstrate how predicted uncertainties can be used to select robust control strategies. We conduct experiments on the mobile manipulation problem of articulating everyday objects (e.g. opening a cupboard) and demonstrate the quality of estimated uncertainty and its downstream impact on robustness of inferred control strategies.