Wellness Robots and the Path to Full Autonomy

Existing AI measurement frameworks quantify cognitive capability, task automation, or catastrophic risk, but none measure autonomous agency: the extent to which a system behaves in a self-directed way. A system can saturate capability benchmarks while remaining entirely reactive, acting only when prompted and ceasing all activity when a task completes. We introduce the Autonomous Agency Scale (AAS), a behavioral framework that scores AI systems on a 0-5 lexicon across seven dimensions of agency: cognitive autonomy, temporal persistence, environmental agency, social agency, creative agency, self-awareness, and goal formation, each operationalized by falsifiable threshold tests. Every dimension is scored in two temporal bands: an Active band covering engaged, user-initiated activity, and an Ambient band covering idle periods. Ambient Level 4 is gated by the Idle-Gap Test, a counterfactual criterion (remove all triggers and observe whether internally derived activity persists) that separates self-direction from scheduled rule-following. We apply the scale to six contemporary systems spanning task agents (Claude Code, Manus, Hermes), consumer assistants (ChatGPT, Siri), and a persistent companion architecture (Airi). The two-band profile quantifies a boundary that single-score frameworks conflate: task agents reach Active composites of 2.3-2.4 while scoring 0.6-1.9 Ambient, with every idle-period behavior attributable to user-configured schedules, whereas the companion architecture, evaluated longitudinally, is the only assessed system whose idle-period behavior survives trigger removal. We discuss limitations, including single-rater provenance, developer-evaluator bias on the longitudinal assessment, and the partially operationalized self-direction boundary in the Active band.

Socially assistive robots (SARs) can support structured health and well-being interventions, but hardware and cost constraints limit interaction complexity and longitudinal real-world deployments. We present DART: Deployable Architecture for Robot-Mediated Tasks, an architecture that extends SARs through a web application and cloud infrastructure, enabling visual content, user input, remote computation, and persistent data storage synergistically with the robot's physical embodiment, speech, and movement. We evaluated DART by instantiating it in an interatively-developed full-stack HRI system for helping university students with elevated generalized anxiety to complete cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) homework exercises. The resulting system, which used the low-cost open-source Blossom robot platform, was refined and evaluated through a participatory design process and multiple user studies, and finally evaluated in an in-lab study with 103 participants, and then a six-week in-home deployment with four participants. In the in-lab evaluation, participants showed significant within-session reductions in stress, state anxiety, and negative affect, and gave the platform a mean System Usability Scale score of 78.89. In the home deployment, the mean System Usability Scale score was 87.5, with positive qualitative feedback on usability. Participants across both groups identified speech input, visual presentation, and web-robot synchronization as priorities for improvement. These findings validate DART as an effective architecture for extending the capabilities of a low-cost SAR in both in-lab single-session and in real-world longitudinal deployments.

LLM-based robotic agent systems can generate programs for robot control, yet their generalization to new tasks often depends on elaborate scaffolding. Expanding their skill repertoires alone offers limited guidance on how to assess new capabilities or identify what remains beyond their reach. We introduce META-Robot, a framework that couples self cognition with capability scaling by expanding the criteria through which an agent evaluates and develops its skills. At its core, action-level predicates make execution outcomes explicit and available for LLM reasoning. The agent uses these assessments to identify its own limitations, extend relevant evaluation criteria, and guide the structured expansion of its skills. Proprioceptive feedback further grounds this process in the robot's physical state, enriching the evidence available for self-cognition. Experiments in simulation and on real robots demonstrate stronger overall task performance, generalization to new tasks, continued expansion of skills and evaluation criteria, and effective use of non-visual proprioceptive signals.