VoLo: A Physical Orchestrator for Open-Vocabulary Long-Horizon Manipulation
This paper presents VoLoAgent, a VLM-based system for open-vocabulary long-horizon manipulation that orchestrates heterogeneous robot capabilities as interruptible tools. It introduces a closed agent loop for planning, monitoring, and recovery in real physical environments. The RoboVoLo benchmark is also introduced, demonstrating significant improvements over single VLA/VLM or tool-based systems.
[2606.07723] VoLo: A Physical Orchestrator for Open-Vocabulary Long-Horizon Manipulation
[Submitted on 5 Jun 2026]
Title:VoLo: A Physical Orchestrator for Open-Vocabulary Long-Horizon Manipulation
View a PDF of the paper titled VoLo: A Physical Orchestrator for Open-Vocabulary Long-Horizon Manipulation, by 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
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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: this https URL
Subjects:
Robotics (cs.RO)
Cite as: arXiv:2606.07723 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2606.07723v1 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.07723
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Siyi Chen [view email] [v1] Fri, 5 Jun 2026 16:21:27 UTC (19,878 KB)
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