Robustness of Robotic Manipulation: Foundations and Frontiers
For robotic manipulation researchers, this work unifies fragmented perspectives on robustness, providing a foundational framework to guide future research.
This paper provides a systematic study of manipulation robustness, offering a formal definition and synthesizing principles and mechanisms across perception, planning, control, policy learning, and hardware. It reviews existing metrics and evaluation methods, and discusses open problems toward human-level robustness.
Humans and animals exhibit remarkable robustness in physical manipulation, yet robots remain far behind. Progress toward human-level manipulation robustness is hindered by the absence of a unified and systematic understanding: different subfields frame robustness in distinct ways, often leaving the concept ambiguous and limiting deeper analysis as well as communication across research areas. This paper presents a systematic study of manipulation robustness. We begin with a formal definition, characterizing robustness as the degree to which a manipulation system can achieve its goal in the presence of uncertainty and variation. Building on this definition, we introduce general formulations of manipulation robustness from probabilistic and control-theoretic perspectives. We then synthesize the guiding principles and concrete mechanisms of manipulation robustness across perception, planning, control, policy learning, and hardware, illustrating each mechanism through representative works, including foundational and recent studies. In addition, we revisit existing metrics and evaluation methods for quantifying manipulation robustness. Finally, we distill broader lessons for designing robust manipulation systems and discuss open problems and future directions toward achieving human-level robustness in robotic manipulation.