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arXiv · 2506.17601

Risk-Guided Diffusion: Toward Deploying Robot Foundation Models in Space, Where Failure Is Not An Option

Rohan Thakker·Adarsh Patnaik·Vince Kurtz·Jonas Frey·Jonathan Becktor·Sangwoo Moon·Rob Royce·Marcel Kaufmann·Georgios Georgakis·Pascal Roth·Joel Burdick·Marco Hutter·Shehryar Khattak
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Abstract

Safe, reliable navigation in extreme, unfamiliar terrain is required for future robotic space exploration missions. Recent generative-AI methods learn semantically aware navigation policies from large, cross-embodiment datasets, but offer limited safety guarantees. Inspired by human cognitive science, we propose a risk-guided diffusion framework that fuses a fast, learned "System-1" with a slow, physics-based "System-2", sharing computation at both training and inference to couple adaptability with formal safety. Hardware experiments conducted at the NASA JPL's Mars-analog facility, Mars Yard, show that our approach reduces failure rates by up to $4\times$ while matching the goal-reaching performance of learning-based robotic models by leveraging inference-time compute without any additional training.

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Rohan Thakker, Adarsh Patnaik, Vince Kurtz, Jonas Frey, Jonathan Becktor, Sangwoo Moon, Rob Royce, Marcel Kaufmann, Georgios Georgakis, Pascal Roth, Joel Burdick, Marco Hutter, Shehryar Khattak. 2025-06-21. Risk-Guided Diffusion: Toward Deploying Robot Foundation Models in Space, Where Failure Is Not An Option. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17601

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