| title | VoLo: A Physical Orchestrator for Open-Vocabulary Long-Horizon Manipulation |
|---|---|
| authors | Siyi Chen, Hugo Hadfield, Alex Zook, Mikaela Angelina Uy, Chan Hee Song, Erwin Coumans, Xuning Yang, Faisal Ladhak, Qing Qu, Stan Birchfield, Jonathan Tremblay, Valts Blukis |
| date | 2026-06-05 |
| venue | arXiv (preprint, not peer reviewed) |
| id | arXiv:2606.07723 |
| affiliation | NVIDIA |
| upvotes | 6 (Hugging Face Daily Papers, 2026-11-01) |
| links | abs pdf hf |
| abstract | Open-vocabulary long-horizon manipulation requires robots to reason over flexible instructions and complex multi-object scenes while adaptively planning, executing, monitoring, and recovering from failures. We address these demands with a closed agent loop in which a VLM orchestrates heterogeneous robot capabilities as interruptible tools. Unlike in virtual AI agents, the timing of decisions, actions and tool calls is important in a physical world that does not pause for reasoning. We refer to this setting as Physical Orchestration, and propose VoLoAgent, a VLM that plans, monitors, and recovers by treating a VLA/WAM as an interruptible tool it steers mid-rollout alongside vision models and action primitives. To evaluate these long-horizon capabilities, we introduce RoboVoLo, a high-fidelity benchmark for open-vocabulary long-horizon manipulation across common sense, memory/state tracking, complex references, and world knowledge, with both task-level success and failure-mode diagnostics. Experiments show VoLoAgent substantially outperforms single VLA/VLM or tool-based systems, with validation on real-robot experiments. Project page: https://chicychen.github.io/VoLo/ |
cite
@misc{chen2026volo,
title={VoLo: A Physical Orchestrator for Open-Vocabulary Long-Horizon Manipulation},
author={Siyi Chen and Hugo Hadfield and Alex Zook and Mikaela Angelina Uy and Chan Hee Song and Erwin Coumans and Xuning Yang and Faisal Ladhak and Qing Qu and Stan Birchfield and Jonathan Tremblay and Valts Blukis},
year={2026},
eprint={2606.07723},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07723}
}