Nov 6, 2026J/K move · Enter open · S save
Ramy ElMallah, Marc Bishara, Hyegang Kim, Yuxi Zhang+2
Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Recent progress in embodied robotics is bringing robots closer to deployment in homes, as vision-language models (VLMs) are demonstrating significant advances in reasoning, making VLM-driven robots promising home assistant agents. These agents will often be introduced into homes that already have cameras, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and residents with wearables. To fulfill their potential, they need to integrate with existing smart infrastructure and reason through ambiguous scenarios: a smoke alarm may come from a pan about to ignite, a pan already on fire, a resident cooking or a faulty sensor, and each calls for a different response. To that end, we introduce HomeLoop, a simulation framework and benchmark built on Isaac Sim that combines robot bodies, networked devices and wearables, simulated residents and visitors, faulty sensors, and hazards that evolve over time. Our benchmark is composed of 20 tasks across five families grounded in real-world household hazards and needs, and designed so that the same alert can have different causes. A runtime monitor scores each episode with temporal-logic checks on the final outcome and the actions along the way, and every action carries a predefined cost. We evaluate six open-weight and proprietary VLMs. The best achieves a family-balanced score of 61.9%, and across models we see a pattern of over-reaction: failed episodes involving prohibited interventions outnumber those involving missed required interventions by more than two to one, with models often shutting off the stove before investigating the alarm's cause. HomeLoop is an extensible foundation intended for use in research on robot-IoT coordination, long-term memory, proactive assistance, and privacy-safety trade-offs. HomeLoop will be released with 2,100 home layouts that can be automatically furnished in diverse configurations, five robot bodies and 20 networked device types.