让机器人长时程任务实现异步、可复现的闭环控制。
Retriever: Composing Closed-Loop Asynchronous Robot Programs

- 用带时钟的状态流函数图表示机器人决策流程。
- 支持从异步日志中确定性回放,调试更可靠。
- 适合需要稳定、可复现的机器人系统开发者。
构建长时程机器人智能体需要组合感知、信念更新、规划和控制等环节,这些组件运行在不同时间周期且延迟可变。当前系统多依赖临时并发与发布/订阅机制,导致时间调度和输入消耗语义不明确,行为依赖时序,难以复现、调试和复用。现有方案通常只在算法或系统层解决部分问题,无法兼顾。本文提出Retriever,覆盖从异步决策模型、编程模型、运行时到完整闭环代理管道的全栈设计。它将智能体建模为状态化因果流函数图,在显式运行时钟上执行。我们通过连续时间流上的异步环境-智能体循环形式化该视图,证明有限记忆因果策略可通过这些算子组合表示。Retriever将图编译为支持多后端的运行时,实现跨环境系统性调试,并可从记录的异步数据中进行确定性回放。我们在真实机器人案例研究及受控实验中评估了其运行时开销和回放行为。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Building long-horizon robot agents requires composing closed-loop pipelines -- perception, belief update, planning, and control -- whose components run at different clocks and with variable latency. Today, these systems are often assembled with ad-hoc concurrency and pub/sub conventions that make timing and input-consumption semantics implicit, yielding schedule-dependent behavior that is hard to reproduce, debug, and reuse. Current solutions typically solve parts of this problem at either the algorithmic or the systems layer, but not both. In this work, we propose Retriever, which spans the entire stack: an asynchronous decision model, a programming model, a runtime, and an example closed-loop agent pipeline. Retriever represents an agent as a graph of stateful causal stream functions executed on explicit run clocks. We formalize this view via an asynchronous environment-agent loop over continuous-time streams and show that finite-memory causal policies can be represented by compositions of these operators. Retriever compiles these graphs into a runtime that supports multiple backends, enabling systematic debugging across running environments and deterministic replay from logged asynchronous data. We evaluate Retriever through a real-robot case study together with controlled studies of runtime overhead and deterministic replay behavior.
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