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arXiv · 2606.07723

VoLo: A Physical Orchestrator for Open-Vocabulary Long-Horizon Manipulation

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
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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: https://chicychen.github.io/VoLo/

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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. 2026-06-05. VoLo: A Physical Orchestrator for Open-Vocabulary Long-Horizon Manipulation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07723

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