Case context: A robotics engineer tests an autonomous cart on a closed course and sees one run where it makes a sharp corrective turn that a safety reviewer judges unnecessary. The pipeline has three stages: pose estimation (A), obstacle detection (B), and motion planning (C).

Question: What exact procedure should the engineer use to determine whether component A (pose estimation) caused the bad motion decision, and how should the result be interpreted?

Sample answer: The engineer should replace A’s output for this one run with the logged ground-truth pose from the test system. They should then run B as usual and let C make its decision using A’s corrected pose estimate. If the new motion plan becomes noticeably smoother or less abrupt, that shows A’s original pose error was a major contributor, so the fault should be attributed to A. If the decision is still poor even with a perfect A, then A is not the main cause, and the same isolate-and-test procedure should be applied to B next.

Key points:

• Replace A’s output for the case with the correct pose
• Re-run B normally and feed the corrected A output into C
• A better motion decision means the error is attributable to A
• No meaningful improvement means A is not the main source
• The same test can then be used to examine B

Rubric: Full credit describes replacing A’s output with the correct pose for the episode, rerunning B and C with C consuming the corrected A output, and correctly interprets both improvement and no-improvement outcomes; partial credit for describing only part of the procedure.