When Your State Estimator Has Lost The Plot: Detecting Estimator Failures Via Spectral Analysis
arXiv:2608.10623v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable onboard state estimation is essential for safe robotic operation, yet unmodeled disturbances, such as sensor aliasing or out-of-distribution noise, still cause estimators to degrade or fail completely. While many methods aim to improve estimator robustness, only a few provide introspective mechanisms to assess estimate quality. Existing uncertainty measures, such as covariances, rely on idealized assumptions and tend to be overconfident,
Overview
arXiv:2608.10623v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable onboard state estimation is essential for safe robotic operation, yet unmodeled disturbances, such as sensor aliasing or out-of-distribution noise, still cause estimators to degrade or fail completely. While many methods aim to improve estimator robustness, only a few provide introspective mechanisms to assess estimate quality. Existing uncertainty measures, such as covariances, rely on idealized assumptions and tend to be overconfident, and more recent data-driven approaches are typically tied to their training data distributions. We propose a sensor-agnostic introspective method that assesses estimator health by analyzing the frequency-domain power distribution of recent velocity estimates. The method is evaluated using outdoor flight data from an aerial robot running visual-inertial, LiDAR-inertial, and radar-inertial odometry. The dataset includes multiple estimator failures, enabling analysis of several frequency-domain indicators, such as signal power, spectral bandwidth, and entropy. We observe consistent spectral power differences between healthy and degraded estimates, allowing detection of 51%-58% of labeled failures with 60%-84% precision across three fundamentally different state estimation frameworks. Our results show that even a simple frequency-domain analysis of a state estimator's output can serve as a lightweight introspective tool to complement existing robustness techniques in real-world robotic deployments, and opens promising avenues for future investigation.
Source
Originally published at arxiv.org.
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Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10623