Not an Accident: Exploiting Safety Filter Inadequacy in Humanoid Robots

Summary

This paper shows that safety filters on humanoid robots guarantee collision avoidance only when their safety parameters are configured correctly, and that no general method exists to set them across deployments. The authors present goal insertion attacks, which use normal user interactions without extra privileges, and build SIREN, an automated tool that identifies vulnerable goals for a given task and environment. SIREN finds attacks in all vulnerable scenarios in the SPARK dataset, discovers three times as many as a baseline approach, and causes a real humanoid to collide while executing tasks.

Topics

• Robotics and embodied AI

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