Reasoning Operational Decisions for Robots via Time Series Causal Inference

Yu Cao*, Boyang Li, Qian Li, Adam Stokes, David Ingram, Aristides Kiprakis

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Justifying operational decisions for robots is a challenging task as the operator or the robot itself has to understand the underlying physical interaction between the robot and the environment to predict the potential outcome. It is desirable to understand how the decision influences the operational performance in the way of causal relationship for the purpose of explainable decision-making. Here we propose a novel causal inference framework for the discovery and inference on the reasoning of the operational decisions for robots. It unifies both domain knowledge integration and model-free causal inference, allowing a data-driven causal knowledge learning on time series data. The framework is evaluated in the experiments of an underwater robot with complex environmental interactions. The results show that the framework can learn the causal structure and inference model to accurately explain and predict the operation performance with integrated physics.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2021
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Pages6124-6131
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781728190778
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 18 Oct 2021
Event2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2021 - Xi'an, China
Duration: 30 May 20215 Jun 2021

Publication series

NameProceedings - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
Volume2021-May
ISSN (Print)1050-4729

Conference

Conference2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2021
Country/TerritoryChina
CityXi'an
Period30/05/215/06/21

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