# When Black-Box Robot Policies Fail: Online Sensor Diagnosis and Repair with a Transparent Surrogate

- Source: arXiv cs.RO
- Published: 2026-10-28T04:00:00.000Z
- RoboHot: https://robohot.news/en/items/f5uh8f87rfvhlu70tph3mdfql
- Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36852

## Summary

The study proposes a structured surrogate model that separates periodic gait from sensor-dependent correction terms, diagnosing and repairing corrupted inputs externally around a frozen locomotion policy. On simulated Go2, offline diagnosis raises walking success from 259/640 to 429/640, while online repair reaches 382/640, with no repair triggered in 64 held-out fault-free episodes. The authors note that the evidence remains limited to a single policy and a partly screened simulated fault set, and that robot foundation model and hardware validation have not yet been conducted.