Understanding Mitigation & Remediation in a Robotics Context
Mitigation and remediation. These are words common to the world of environmental engineering, but are rarely used in field robotics. I’d like to change that, and for these powerful tools to help shape our conversation around robotic systems.
Mitigation: actions taken to reduce or prevent the negative impacts of a particular activity or event. Given the case of, say, natural disasters, mitigation measures might include building stronger infrastructure, implementing early warning systems, and creating evacuation plans.
Remediation: actions taken to address and fix the negative impacts of a particular activity or event. Continuing our case of a natural disaster, remediation might involve providing emergency supplies and medical care, repairing damaged infrastructure, or rebuilding homes and businesses.
While both mitigation and remediation are important components of environmental management and disaster response, they are simply different stages of the healing process. Mitigation aims to prevent or minimize harm before it occurs, while remediative actions focus on what’s been done and fix harm that has already occurred.
So, how does this apply to robotics? Well, using defined terminology adds cohesion to an organization, and makes communication across departments easier. Inside of robotics we have people with all different backgrounds working together to achieve a common goal, and these blends of backgrounds can make debugging of issues observed in the field difficult to fully close the loop.
If a family of birds starts roosting in the sensor pods of your robots in a particular city, different teams care about different things. The on-the-ground Operations team cares mostly about a remediation in the form of resuming operations as quickly as possible. How can we ship vehicles from other cities, or can someone figure out if there really are birds living in our robot? The engineering leadership team is probably more concerned about mitigation — when did we start sprinkling the cars with birdseed at the end of each shift?
It’s human nature to first think of mitigation actions when what’s really called for is remediation. If end-users are complaining of an inability to use a touch screen, my first thought is one of mitigation: “did they wipe their hand and try again?” That’s always a part of the product lifecycle, but fully understanding and building an issue triage pipeline that is fault-tolerant of issues that can be solved with mitigations, and escalation of issues that require remediation is crucial.
Framing issue management in terms of remediation and mitigation allows you to understand bug fixes and higher-level planning. KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!) should be on a continuous loop in the back of everyone’s mind when designing a robot. The real world throws plenty of curveballs at your system, there’s no reason to add complexity for the sake of complexity. After issues observed in the fleet are triaged and solutions are being weighed, don’t be afraid to speak up and ask, “are we talking about a mitigation, or a real issue remediation.”
