Oscar Lima

Oscar Lima, Marc Vinci, Martin Günther et al.

Recent work leverages the capabilities and commonsense priors of generative models for robot control. In this paper, we present an agentic control system in which a reasoning-capable language model plans and executes tasks by selecting and invoking robot skills within an iterative planner and executor loop. We deploy the system on two physical robot platforms in two settings: (i) tabletop grasping, placement, and box insertion in indoor mobile manipulation (Mobipick) and (ii) autonomous agricultural navigation and sensing (Valdemar). Both settings involve uncertainty, partial observability, sensor noise, and ambiguous natural-language commands. The system exposes structured introspection of its planning and decision process, reacts to exogenous events via explicit event checks, and supports operator interventions that modify or redirect ongoing execution. Across both platforms, our proof-of-concept experiments reveal substantial fragility, including non-deterministic suboptimal behavior, instruction-following errors, and high sensitivity to prompt specification. At the same time, the architecture is flexible: transfer to a different robot and task domain largely required updating the system prompt (domain model, affordances, and action catalogue) and re-binding the same tool interface to the platform-specific skill API.

Marian Renz, Martin Günther, Felix Igelbrink et al.

While deep learning has significantly advanced robotic object recognition, purely data-driven approaches often lack semantic consistency and fail to leverage valuable, pre-existing knowledge about the environment. This report presents the ExPrIS project, which addresses this challenge by investigating how knowledge-level expectations can serve as to improve object interpretation from sensor data. Our approach is based on the incremental construction of a 3D Semantic Scene Graph (3DSSG). We integrate expectations from two sources: contextual priors from past observations and semantic knowledge from external graphs like ConceptNet. These are embedded into a heterogeneous Graph Neural Network (GNN) to create an expectation-biased inference process. This method moves beyond static, frame-by-frame analysis to enhance the robustness and consistency of scene understanding over time. The report details this architecture, its evaluation, and outlines its planned integration on a mobile robotic platform.