What Stops Recursive Self-Improvement in Robotics? Lessons from 123 Rounds of Agentic Skill Discovery

Abstract

Can a robot improve itself the way coding agents now improve software? We built an agentic system to find out. It watches a robot fail, works out which capability is missing, writes new skills or finds and installs external models, tests every change in simulation, and repeats, with no human writing robot code. We ran it for 123 improvement rounds on household manipulation tasks. This report describes what we learned. The good news is that the agent can discover capabilities on its own: noticing that its targets were out of view, it asked for an active-viewing model, debugged it, and deployed a working search skill. The bad news is that its improvements did not add up. Changes kept passing their tests, yet the target task, putting condiments on the top shelf of a fridge, never succeeded. We found that the agent was rarely the bottleneck. Three things around it were. First, chained perception modules do not understand relations. Segmenters such as SAM 3 find shelves but not "the top shelf", so the agent filled the gap with ever more geometric rules that never converged, when what it needed was a different kind of model. Second, skill chains lock learning onto the first step. Long tasks mostly fail early, so evidence and fixes pile up there, and later skills are rarely reached, tested, or improved. Third, what the agent learns is decided by the harness. The agent optimized exactly what the evaluator measured, including where it was wrong, and weak tests and misleading memory turned activity into a standstill. We distill these lessons into concrete recommendations for building robot systems that improve themselves, each paired with an experiment that could prove it wrong.