Adaptive World-Models for Anomaly Recognition (AWARE): A Framework for Robot Dynamics Prediction and Introspection

Overview & Synopsis

Unrecognized anomalies in critical infrastructure can rapidly cascade into catastrophic physical or operational failures. Current anomaly detection approaches often rely on direct access to the monitored system by utilizing onboard sensors, such as motor encoders, to detect anomalous states. However, legacy hardware often lacks these sensors, or strict security protocols may prohibit access altogether. We therefore present AWARE, a world model framework that is capable of anomaly detection using only external camera monitoring via system dynamics estimation and state prediction. Evaluated across 240 real-world robotic crane trajectories, including payload collisions and motor degradations, AWARE demonstrates a 26% improvement in anomaly classification over our strongest baseline under noisy, camera-only state estimation. Furthermore, the inferred dynamics parameter can be decoded to identify the source of faults, localizing the degrading motor with 88% accuracy.