Test-Time Adaptation of Manipulation Policies Under Actuator Degradation

arXiv:2609.36182v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robot manipulation policies are usually trained under the assumption that a commanded action produces the same motion as it did during training even after hours of operation. Real hardware violates this assumption as the motors gradually heat up, current saturates near contact, voltage sags under load, thus the same policy action can produce a weaker, delayed, or noisier motion. These conditions are already measured by onboard telemetry, such as joint temperature, motor current, and supply voltage, yet this signal is typically used only for logging or safety checks rather than policy adaptation. We introduce Telemetry-Aware Action Rectification (TeAR), a policy-agnostic method that turns a frozen manipulation policy into a telemetry-conditioned policy by rectifying its outgoing action before it reaches the low-level controller. TeAR learns a lightweight Transformer that combines the proposed action with live actuator telemetry and amplifies, damps, or biases individual action components. We evaluate TeAR across 18 policy-task pairs spanning 8 policy families and 5 manipulation tasks. In an additional paired evaluation with degradation-model mismatch, TeAR achieves 31.8% success, compared with 25.6% for the base policy and 30.6% for an assumed-model inverse. On a physical arm, TeAR improves success under heating by 10-15% without on-robot fine-tuning.

Abstract:Robot manipulation policies are usually trained under the assumption that a commanded action produces the same motion as it did during training even after hours of operation. Real hardware violates this assumption as the motors gradually heat up, current saturates near contact, voltage sags under load, thus the same policy action can produce a weaker, delayed, or noisier motion. These conditions are already measured by onboard telemetry, such as joint temperature, motor current, and supply voltage, yet this signal is typically used only for logging or safety checks rather than policy adaptation. We introduce Telemetry-Aware Action Rectification (TeAR), a policy-agnostic method that turns a frozen manipulation policy into a telemetry-conditioned policy by rectifying its outgoing action before it reaches the low-level controller. TeAR learns a lightweight Transformer that combines the proposed action with live actuator telemetry and amplifies, damps, or biases individual action components. We evaluate TeAR across 18 policy-task pairs spanning 8 policy families and 5 manipulation tasks. In an additional paired evaluation with degradation-model mismatch, TeAR achieves 31.8% success, compared with 25.6% for the base policy and 30.6% for an assumed-model inverse. On a physical arm, TeAR improves success under heating by 10-15% without on-robot fine-tuning.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2609.36182 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.36182v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.36182 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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Test-Time Adaptation of Manipulation Policies Under Actuator Degradation

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