Robotic Task Success Evaluation Under Multi-modal Non-Parametric Object Pose Uncertainty

Accurate 6D object pose estimation is essential for various robotic tasks. Uncertain pose estimates can lead to task failures; however, a certain degree of error in the pose estimates is often acceptable. Hence, by quantifying errors in the object pose estimate and acceptable errors for task success, robots can make informed decisions. This is a challenging problem as both the object pose uncertainty and acceptable error for the robotic task are often multi-modal and cannot be parameterized with commonly used uni-modal distributions. In this paper, we introduce a framework for evaluating robotic task success under object pose uncertainty, representing both the estimated error space of the object pose and the acceptable error space for task success using multi-modal non-parametric probability distributions. The proposed framework pre-computes the acceptable error space for task success using dynamic simulations and subsequently integrates the pre-computed acceptable error space over the estimated error space of the object pose to predict the likelihood of the task success. We evaluated the proposed framework on two mobile manipulation tasks. Our results show that by representing the estimated and the acceptable error space using multi-modal non-parametric distributions, we achieve higher task success rates and fewer failures.