Are Frontier VLM Agents Ready to Be Robot Generalists? An Empirical Study with the Embodied Agent Arena
The study tested frontier vision-language models using an embodied agent arena to see if they can perform complete robotic tasks. While models like Astra excel at precise estimation and contact localization, they struggle to execute coordinated, goal-directed actions necessary for generalist robotics. The core gap is converting local competence into reliable task completion.