NVIDIA's VoLo lands at CoRL 2026: a VLM agent that orchestrates robots through long-horizon tasks
erwincoumans · x · 2026-09-08
VoLo, a CoRL 2026 paper from NVIDIA and University of Michigan, frames open-vocabulary long-horizon manipulation as "physical orchestration": a VLM agent with memory plans, monitors, detects failures, recovers, and steers heterogeneous capabilities (VLA/WAMs, SAM3, grasp/place primitives) as interruptible tools—crucially without pausing the physical world.
- Introduces RoboVoLo, a high-fidelity simulation benchmark with 126 tasks spanning common sense, memory/state tracking, complex references, and world knowledge, with failure-mode diagnostics.
- Work led by Siyi Chen during an NVIDIA internship; project page, arXiv paper, and code are public.
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