RACAS: Controlling Diverse Robots With a Single Agentic System
Organizations: Center of Excellence in Generative AI, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia. · Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research (IDSIA), Switzerland. · Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), Switzerland. · Scuola universitaria professionale della Svizzera italiana (SUPSI), Switzerland. ·
Abstract
Many robotic platforms expose an API through which external software can command their actuators and read their sensors. However, transitioning from these low-level interfaces to high-level autonomous behaviour requires a complicated pipeline, whose components demand distinct areas of expertise. Existing approaches to bridging this gap either require retraining for every new embodiment or have only been validated across structurally similar platforms. We introduce RACAS (Robot-Agnostic Control via Agentic Systems), a cooperative agentic architecture in which three LLM/VLM-based modules (Monitors, a Controller, and a Memory Curator) communicate exclusively through natural language to provide closed-loop robot control. RACAS requires only a natural language description of the robot, a definition of available actions, and a task specification; no source code, model weights, or reward functions need to be modified to move between platforms. We evaluate RACAS on several tasks using a wheeled ground robot, a recently published novel multi-jointed robotic limb, and an underwater vehicle. RACAS consistently solved all assigned tasks across these radically different platforms, demonstrating the potential of agentic AI to substantially reduce the barrier to prototyping robotic solutions.
Figures & tables
| Platform | Morphology | # Cam. | Img. res. | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alhakami et al. Limb | 4-DOF arm | 4 | 9 | |
| Dingo (simulation) | 3-DOF Wheeled | 3 | 4 | |
| Dingo (real-world) | 3-DOF Wheeled | 1 | 4 | |
| BlueROV2 | 6-DOF ROV | 1 | 6 |
| Experiment | Baseline | RACAS | Min. |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dingo (simulation) | 25.00 0.00 | 16.40 0.96 | 10 |
| Dingo (real-world) | N/A | 25.80 4.94 | 7 |
| Alhakami et al. Limb | 22.07 0.98 | 9.56 1.50 | 3 |
| BlueROV2 (small tank) | N/A | 14.00 1.75 | 5 |
| BlueROV2 (large pool) | N/A | 19.20 6.51 | 5 |
Appendix figures & tables1 asset
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.