Gregory Sin

Xian Yeow Lee, Lasitha Vidyaratne, Gregory Sin et al.

Autonomous inspection in hazardous environments requires AI agents that can interpret high-level goals and execute precise control. A key capability for such agents is spatial grounding, for example when a drone must center a detected object in its camera view to enable reliable inspection. While large language models provide a natural interface for specifying goals, using them directly for visual control achieves only 58\% success in this task. We envision that equipping agents with a world model as a tool would allow them to roll out candidate actions and perform better in spatially grounded settings, but conventional world models are data and compute intensive. To address this, we propose a task-specific latent dynamics model that learns state-specific action-induced shifts in a shared latent space using only goal-state supervision. The model leverages global action embeddings and complementary training losses to stabilize learning. In experiments, our approach achieves 71\% success and generalizes to unseen images and instructions, highlighting the potential of compact, domain-specific latent dynamics models for spatial alignment in autonomous inspection.

Ethan Herron, Xian Yeow Lee, Gregory Sin et al.

Autonomous inspection systems are essential for ensuring the performance and longevity of industrial assets. Recently, agentic frameworks have demonstrated significant potential for automating inspection workflows but have been limited to digital tasks. Their application to physical assets in real-world environments, however, remains underexplored. In this work, our contributions are two-fold: first, we propose a hierarchical agentic framework for autonomous drone control, and second, a reasoning methodology for individual function executions which we refer to as ReActEval. Our framework focuses on visual inspection tasks in indoor industrial settings, such as interpreting industrial readouts or inspecting equipment. It employs a multi-agent system comprising a head agent and multiple worker agents, each controlling a single drone. The head agent performs high-level planning and evaluates outcomes, while worker agents implement ReActEval to reason over and execute low-level actions. Operating entirely in natural language, ReActEval follows a plan, reason, act, evaluate cycle, enabling drones to handle tasks ranging from simple navigation (e.g., flying forward 10 meters and land) to complex high-level tasks (e.g., locating and reading a pressure gauge). The evaluation phase serves as a feedback and/or replanning stage, ensuring actions align with user objectives while preventing undesirable outcomes. We evaluate the framework in a simulated environment with two worker agents, assessing performance qualitatively and quantitatively based on task completion across varying complexity levels and workflow efficiency. By leveraging natural language processing for agent communication, our approach offers a novel, flexible, and user-accessible alternative to traditional drone-based solutions, enabling autonomous problem-solving for industrial inspection without extensive user intervention.