Robotics
♻ ★ FlySearch: Exploring how vision-language models explore
The real world is messy and unstructured. Uncovering critical information
often requires active, goal-driven exploration. It remains to be seen whether
Vision-Language Models (VLMs), which recently emerged as a popular zero-shot
tool in many difficult tasks, can operate effectively in such conditions. In
this paper, we answer this question by introducing FlySearch, a 3D, outdoor,
photorealistic environment for searching and navigating to objects in complex
scenes. We define three sets of scenarios with varying difficulty and observe
that state-of-the-art VLMs cannot reliably solve even the simplest exploration
tasks, with the gap to human performance increasing as the tasks get harder. We
identify a set of central causes, ranging from vision hallucination, through
context misunderstanding, to task planning failures, and we show that some of
them can be addressed by finetuning. We publicly release the benchmark,
scenarios, and the underlying codebase.
♻ ★ Multi Layered Autonomy and AI Ecologies in Robotic Art Installations
Symbiosis of Agents is a large-scale installation by Baoyang Chen
(baoyangchen.com) that embeds AI-driven robots in an immersive, mirror-lined
arena, probing the tension between machine agency and artistic authorship.
Drawing on early cybernetics, rule-based conceptual art, and seminal robotic
works, it orchestrates fluid exchanges among robotic arms, quadruped machines,
their environment, and the public. A three tier faith system pilots the
ecology: micro-level adaptive tactics, meso-level narrative drives, and a
macro-level prime directive. This hierarchy lets behaviors evolve organically
in response to environmental cues and even a viewer's breath, turning
spectators into co-authors of the unfolding drama. Framed by a speculative
terraforming scenario that recalls the historical exploitation of marginalized
labor, the piece asks who bears responsibility in AI-mediated futures.
Choreographed motion, AI-generated scripts, reactive lighting, and drifting fog
cast the robots as collaborators rather than tools, forging a living, emergent
artwork. Exhibited internationally, Symbiosis of Agents shows how cybernetic
feedback, robotic experimentation, and conceptual rule-making can converge to
redefine agency, authorship, and ethics in contemporary art.