TEAR: Task-Evidence Authority Routing for Robotic Manipulation

Overview & Synopsis

Reliable robotic manipulation in field-deployed settings requires more than executing a capable controller. As the execution conditions change, the system must decide, online and on the robot side, which control source should hold authority. Human teleoperation adapts readily to contact-rich and semantically ambiguous situations but depends on a stable communication link. Local autonomy is executed without continuous human intervention, but may fail under semantic ambiguity, long-horizon drift, and unforeseen contingencies. These two control sources exhibit complementary reliability profiles. We formulate this complementarity as a control authority routing problem and present Task-Evidence Authority Routing for Robotic Manipulation (TEAR), an edge-deployable framework that allocates authority between human teleoperation and local autonomy. TEAR arbitrates on the robot side using network-state evidence, which governs the usability of teleoperation, and task-semantic evidence, which reflects whether autonomous execution remains consistent with the current task. A lightweight temporal arbitrator observes both forms of evidence together with robot state and current authority to time authority transfers. Across simulated and real-world trials under dynamic network conditions, TEAR achieves task success rates close to pure teleoperation while limiting teleoperation to 19.8-27.4% of control steps and improves success by 30-40% over autonomy-only execution in our settings. These results demonstrate the potential of complementary authority routing to sustain successful manipulation with substantially reduced dependence on continuous human control.