From motion control to human-aware decisions.
Research question: once the robot can move, how should it decide what to do around people? The reported benchmark is offline, while the broader study also includes online integration experiments and safety-projected decision paths. It should not be described as raw closed-loop VLM motor control.
This panel summarizes the offline decision benchmark. It is not a live robot-control dashboard.
Meaning: Yield or pause when a person is directly ahead or approaching.
Typical situation: Approaching or directly blocked person.
Why it exists: Keeps the policy conservative in socially occupied space.
Deployment note: High-level decision only, not a direct brake command.
The move to VLM evaluation came from a representation bottleneck. Motion control is not the same as social decision-making once people appear in the scene.
The action space is deliberately higher level than motor control. These labels describe what the robot should decide socially, not how each joint should move.
The reported benchmark is evaluated offline over extracted front-camera frames from curated Go1 rosbags. The broader study also includes controller-side integration experiments and safety-projected online decision tests.
The dashboard above contains the benchmark summary. The points below are the parts that mattered most when interpreting the run.
Unsafe-forward mattered more than raw accuracy alone because these are the cases most likely to violate a conservative social policy.
The reported benchmark is offline, while the broader study also includes wrapper integration, control-path experiments, and safety-projected online decision studies. It should still not be described as deployed raw VLM robot control.
VLM latency and missing geometric guarantees make raw low-level control a poor fit. The more defensible use is a slower semantic layer whose outputs are projected through a safety boundary before anything executable is considered.
This clip is included as study media for the later Go1 social-navigation phase. It belongs with the broader controller-side integration work and still should not be read as evidence of raw closed-loop VLM motor control.
The next steps are mostly about making the semantic layer more reliable and tightening how it hands decisions to the fast safety loop.
The full archive now lives in the shared Research Notebook. The links here stay focused on the notes most relevant to the VLM social-navigation study.