EmbodiedGovBench: A Benchmark for Governance, Recovery, and Upgrade Safety in Embodied Agent Systems
This benchmark addresses the critical but overlooked need for governance evaluation in embodied AI, providing a framework for researchers and developers to ensure systems remain safe and controllable under realistic conditions.
EmbodiedGovBench introduces a benchmark for evaluating governance in embodied AI systems, focusing on controllability, policy enforcement, recovery, auditability, and upgrade safety, rather than just task completion. It defines seven governance dimensions and provides scenario templates, perturbation operators, and metrics for both single-robot and fleet settings.
Recent progress in embodied AI has produced a growing ecosystem of robot policies, foundation models, and modular runtimes. However, current evaluation remains dominated by task success metrics such as completion rate or manipulation accuracy. These metrics leave a critical gap: they do not measure whether embodied systems are governable -- whether they respect capability boundaries, enforce policies, recover safely, maintain audit trails, and respond to human oversight. We present EmbodiedGovBench, a benchmark for governance-oriented evaluation of embodied agent systems. Rather than asking only whether a robot can complete a task, EmbodiedGovBench evaluates whether the system remains controllable, policy-bounded, recoverable, auditable, and evolution-safe under realistic perturbations. The benchmark covers seven governance dimensions: unauthorized capability invocation, runtime drift robustness, recovery success, policy portability, version upgrade safety, human override responsiveness, and audit completeness. We define a benchmark structure spanning single-robot and fleet settings, with scenario templates, perturbation operators, governance metrics, and baseline evaluation protocols. We describe how the benchmark can be instantiated over embodied capability runtimes with modular interfaces and contract-aware upgrade workflows. Our analysis suggests that embodied governance should become a first-class evaluation target. EmbodiedGovBench provides the initial measurement framework for that shift.