English

AnywhereVLA: Language-Conditioned Exploration and Mobile Manipulation

Robotics 2025-09-26 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

We address natural language pick-and-place in unseen, unpredictable indoor environments with AnywhereVLA, a modular framework for mobile manipulation. A user text prompt serves as an entry point and is parsed into a structured task graph that conditions classical SLAM with LiDAR and cameras, metric semantic mapping, and a task-aware frontier exploration policy. An approach planner then selects visibility and reachability aware pre grasp base poses. For interaction, a compact SmolVLA manipulation head is fine tuned on platform pick and place trajectories for the SO-101 by TheRobotStudio, grounding local visual context and sub-goals into grasp and place proposals. The full system runs fully onboard on consumer-level hardware, with Jetson Orin NX for perception and VLA and an Intel NUC for SLAM, exploration, and control, sustaining real-time operation. We evaluated AnywhereVLA in a multi-room lab under static scenes and normal human motion. In this setting, the system achieves a 46%46\% overall task success rate while maintaining throughput on embedded compute. By combining a classical stack with a fine-tuned VLA manipulation, the system inherits the reliability of geometry-based navigation with the agility and task generalization of language-conditioned manipulation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.21006,
  title  = {AnywhereVLA: Language-Conditioned Exploration and Mobile Manipulation},
  author = {Konstantin Gubernatorov and Artem Voronov and Roman Voronov and Sergei Pasynkov and Stepan Perminov and Ziang Guo and Dzmitry Tsetserukou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.21006},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:55:51.824Z