MAESTRO: Orchestrating Robotics Modules with Coding Agents for Zero-Shot Generalist Robots

Abstract:Today's dominant route to generalist robots scales robotics data to train end-to-end policies. We instead use a vision-language model (VLM) as a coding agent that writes robot programs using a curated library of perception, planning, and control tools. MAESTRO's orchestration harness packages multi-step perception and action procedures into callable tools and guides their use through a plan-act-replan loop, using visual and execution feedback to verify outcomes and recover from failures. With this tool library and harness, MAESTRO matches or surpasses state-of-the-art vision-language-action (VLA) models zero-shot in our tabletop comparison and performs diverse mobile manipulation tasks, without collecting new teleoperation data or invoking a VLA tool. Ablations show that expanding the tool library improves average task progress with the full harness, while adding tools without it does not reliably improve progress. Case studies illustrate MAESTRO's potential for autonomous code improvement across trials, faster execution with VLA tools, and automatic robot data generation. We show that expanding robotics tool libraries together with their orchestration harnesses offers a complementary route to general-purpose robots alongside scaling end-to-end robot training data. Project site: this https URL. Code: this https URL.

34 pages. Accepted at CoRL 2026. Substantially revised with expanded experiments, ablations, and discussion. Project website: this https URL

Robotics (cs.RO); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2511.00917 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2511.00917v3 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2511.00917 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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