Papers for

warehouse operations teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Industrial system scales robot fleet memory by encoding only on demand

Industrial ReMEmbR: Scaling Spatiotemporal Memory to Robot Fleets

Abstract: Warehouse robot fleets continuously observe operational conditions, but preserving these observations as reusable semantic memory incurs substantial computation, communication, and storage costs. For example, explaining recurring aisle blockages can require reviewing video from multiple robots across several shifts. We present IndustrialRemembr, a shared spatiotemporal memory system that extends NVIDIA ReMEmbR to robot fleets and reduces server-side computation by generating scene descriptions only on demand. On each robot, an NVIDIA Jetson encodes video clips into retrieval embeddings with Cosmos-Embed1, vision tokens with Cosmos3-Edge, and reconstruction latents with the Wan2.2 VAE, without uploading raw camera frames. The encoding models are re-used to detect people in image patches, zeroing them out to support PII abstraction for GDPR-compliant deployments. We split Cosmos3-Edge at its vision-language boundary, placing the vision encoder on the robot and the language decoder on an on-premises server. A Nemotron agent retrieves memories by content, position, and time and queries the decoder using cached vision tokens. This design eliminates caption generation at write time, while cached-token decoding reproduces the unsplit model's output in all 450 tested decodes.

Tue 20 OctRoboticsArtificial IntelligenceSoftware Engineering
The gist
Warehouse robot fleets record lots of video to understand their environment, but saving all this data is costly. The authors designed IndustrialReMEmbR, a system that lets robots keep useful memory of their surroundings without sending raw video to central servers. Each robot creates smaller summaries and hides personal information to comply with privacy laws. The system delays creating detailed scene descriptions until needed, reducing computing work on the servers. This approach helps explain events like blocked aisles by searching through useful robot memories efficiently.
Open → 2610.28624v1

GPT 6 Astra shows strong performance in zero shot robot navigation

GPT-6-Astra Lights Up Embodied Navigation: Evaluation in Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments

Abstract: We investigate whether GPT-6-Astra, a general-purpose foundation model, can navigate unfamiliar environments using its own perception, reasoning, and decision-making capabilities. Our evaluation focues on zero-shot vision-and-language navigation in continuous environments (VLN-CE) through a minimal interface in the Codex harness, aiming to unleash GPT-6-Astra's full potential for navigation. Using monocular RGB, GPT-6-Astra decides when to observe, how to move, and when to stop, without navigation-specific fine-tuning, a trained waypoint predictor, or a pre-built scene map. Our evaluation yields four main findings. First, \textbf{\textit{GPT-6-Astra achieves strong zero-shot navigation performance using only monocular RGB observations}}. On the common-adopted zero-shot R2R-CE benchmark, ultra reasoning achieves a success rate of \textbf{\textit{79.0\%}}, exceeding the strongest reported zero-shot and supervised success rates by \textbf{\textit{13.0}} and \textbf{\textit{6.9}} percentage points, respectively. Second, \textbf{\textit{GPT-6-Astra advances multi-stage language instructions into coherent, adaptive navigation}} by grounding spatial relations, tracking task progress, and revising its actions. Third, \textbf{\textit{reliable route execution and goal verification remain challenging, even with ultra reasoning}}. Plausible local landmark matches do not consistently lead to correct task completion. Fourth, \textbf{\textit{these capabilities motivate rethinking the role of embodied learning}}. Future VLN research should build on foundation models to advance generalizable and reliable embodied intelligence.

Thu 24 SeptRobotics
The gist
Navigating new places without prior knowledge is hard for robots and AI. The authors tested a general-purpose AI called GPT-6-Astra to see if it can find its way indoors just by looking around with a single camera and understanding instructions. They found GPT-6-Astra did better than earlier methods, following complex directions and making decisions on the fly without any special training for navigation. However, it still sometimes struggles to confirm it has reached the goal correctly. This work suggests using large foundation models could improve how robots learn to navigate in many different environments.
Open → 2609.29861v1

Robot agent harness ensures verified task completion with self improvement

RegenHarness: A Robot Agent Harness with Evidence-Gated Recursive Self-Improvement

Abstract: Long-horizon robot execution requires a clear distinction between a model's proposal, a controller's termination, and verified task completion. We present RegenHarness, an evidence-gated robot-agent harness connecting task planning to heterogeneous robot skills. Its execution architecture couples a model loop for context-conditioned proposals with an agent loop for dispatch, observation, verification, commitment, and bounded recovery. Four role-isolated contexts separate planning, supervision, verification, and recovery inputs. Versioned memory distinguishes observed facts from accepted task progress, while an identity- and version-bound commit gate controls updates to trusted task state. The runtime combines duplicate-dispatch control, resource leases, and recovery budgets under explicit backend contracts, and checks the original user goal before reporting completion. To our knowledge, we are the first to introduce an evidence-gated recursive self-improvement (RSI) protocol for embodied robotic agents. Across missions, execution records motivate candidate changes to context rules, task templates, routing, and recovery policies; fixed regression checks and release authorization govern their acceptance; versioned rollout and rollback preserve configuration traceability. This RSI protocol revises the harness configuration without online model-weight updates or permission to weaken the commit gate. A real quadruped deployment documents voice-triggered warehouse navigation, panoramic inspection, visual analysis, message delivery, return, and spoken reporting through linked audio, images, trajectories, and receipts. A separate circuit demonstrates why completion depends on execution history rather than endpoint proximity alone. Together, the cases demonstrate integrated perception, physical execution, communication, and history-dependent completion in real-world robot tasks.

Wed 23 SeptRobotics
The gist
Robots often struggle to clearly know when they finish tasks correctly. The authors created a system called RegenHarness that helps robots plan, act, observe, and verify their work step-by-step, keeping track of what’s been done and what can be trusted. It even lets the system improve itself safely by making controlled, tested changes over time without risking mistakes. They tested this on a real four-legged robot doing tasks like warehouse navigation and reporting, showing it works in complex, real-world situations.
Open → 2609.27612v1