Unified robot system improves quadruped property inspection reliability
Harness Robotic OS: A Unified Embodied-Agent Runtime for Closed-Loop Quadruped Inspection
Robotics
Summary
Inspecting properties automatically with robots is tricky because it needs many things working together smoothly, like moving well, understanding scenes, talking with people, and reporting back clearly. The authors built a software system called Harness Robotic OS that unifies these parts into one smart robot 'brain' for inspection. They tested this on a robot dog inspecting homes, and it performed very well, finding hazards, moving accurately, and giving reports with few errors. This system also remembers what it learned and can improve over time without risking uncontrolled changes.
What this means in practice
- •For property inspection teams: Use an integrated robot platform for automated, reliable inspection and hazard detection in residential communities.
- •For industrial automation engineers: Deploy a unified runtime system that coordinates sensing, autonomy, and interaction for quadruped robots in varied environments.
Authors
Yaoyuan Yan, Zhiyou Heng, Haoxiang Jie, Gang Liu, Hongjie Yan, Wei Zhou
Abstract
Autonomous property inspection requires more than robust robot navigation: a deployable system must connect heterogeneous sensing, reusable autonomy capabilities, multimodal scene understanding, human interaction, and enterprise response within a traceable operational loop. Existing quadruped inspection systems commonly integrate these functions through task-specific interfaces, making contextual coordination, knowledge reuse, and controlled adaptation difficult. This paper presents \textit{Harness Robotic OS} (HROS), a unified embodied-agent runtime, and Argos, its realization for residential-community inspection. HROS organizes the system into robot runtime, embodied autonomy skills, cognitive agent runtime, and interaction and operations planes. A shared context connects physical state with agent reasoning; streaming ASR/TTS supports voice-based mission interaction; hierarchical working, episodic, and semantic memory preserves operational knowledge; and a safety-gated self-evolution loop converts execution traces into versioned candidate updates without permitting unconstrained online modification. The Argos prototype integrates a Vbot quadruped, Fast-LIO2 localization and mapping, Hobot-Stereo depth perception, PCT-Planner global planning, EGO-Planner local motion generation, and OpenClaw-orchestrated Qwen3-VL inspection analysis. Experiments in a residential property environment achieved 100\% waypoint reachability, outdoor localization error below 10~cm, local obstacle-response latency below 200~ms, representative hazard-detection rates of 85--95\%, and 99\% success in alarm delivery and structured-report generation. These results validate the deployed navigation and inspection closed loop, while HROS provides an extensible software foundation for memory-augmented, voice-aware, and continuously improvable embodied inspection agents.