PhyAgentOS: A Self-Evolving Operating System for Embodied Agents with Decoupled Cognitive Planning and Physical Execution

Abstract:Vision-language-action models, world models, and agentic planners each advance physical intelligence, yet their composition lacks a common execution abstraction, shared state, semantic verification, and persistent experience across heterogeneous embodiments. We present PhyAgentOS, a runtime foundation delivering scheduling, verification, memory, benchmarking, and safety as system-level services. Its Session-Centered Runtime treats a session, not an action, as the minimum unit of scheduling, compatibility preflight, supervised execution, evidence collection, and acceptance. To decouple cognition from physical execution, the cognition-physics boundary is a file system: the State-as-a-File protocol materializes cross-layer state as Markdown with YAML, yielding inspectable, versionable records without code dependencies between Agent and Runtime layers. These views form a unified cognitive state space aligning intent, capabilities, environment, execution, and experience. The SessionVerifier distinguishes execution termination from semantic task completion via evidence-grounded verdicts of success, failure, or replan. Verified outcomes are consolidated through epistemic memory into reusable knowledge and corrective lessons, closing a trial-and-error loop without retraining. Benchmarking reuses the deployment session and verification path, so results trace to real execution. Layered safety constrains both policy-driven and agent-driven execution: preflight, action bridges, SafetyGuard, heartbeat monitoring, and target-local constraints. Validation is progressive: games test cognitive planning, simulation adds dynamics and control, real robots add hardware noise, with the cognitive layer held constant. PhyAgentOS is benchmarked on Optimus-67, StarDojo, and DST-Dojo, validated on 19+ simulated and physical embodiments, and gains on LIBERO, Calvin, and RoboCasa365 across multiple VLA models.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2607.16636 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2607.16636v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.16636 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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