Are Frontier VLM Agents Ready to Be Robot Generalists? An Empirical Study with the Embodied Agent Arena

Abstract

Frontier vision-language models (VLMs) combine scene estimation, interaction grounding, and executable actions. Understanding how these abilities support complete robotic tasks is central to evaluating their readiness as robot generalists. We introduce Embodied Agent Arena to examine where local competence supports, or falls short of, complete task success across Geometry, Spatial Reasoning, Affordance, Task Planning, and Manipulation. The arena contains 1,000 cases drawn from 32 established sources and GeoProbe, our new benchmark for geometric estimation on Blender renders and real-scene images. A minimal harness preserves source observations and operations while separating metric precision, functional grounding, and native goal completion. We evaluate seven VLMs, analyze Astra's task-specific advantages, and compare richer-observation execution protocols and multi-round review. Across the arena, Astra's advantage is strongest in precise estimation and usable-contact localization; completing coordinated, goal-directed actions remains the key gap to robot generalism.