# RoBridge: A Hierarchical Architecture Bridging Cognition and Execution for General Robotic Manipulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.01709 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01709/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Embodied and 3D vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- First posted on arXiv 3 May 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Embodied and 3D vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/embodied-and-3d-vision-language-models/)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Large VLM-based Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13073/) (2025)
- [MIND-V: Hierarchical World Model for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation with RL-based Physical Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06628/) (2025)
- [A1: A Fully Transparent Open-Source, Adaptive and Efficient Truncated Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05672/) (2026)
- [3D-MoRe: Unified Modal-Contextual Reasoning for Embodied Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12026/) (2025)
- [Image Recognition with Online Lightweight Vision Transformer: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03113/) (2025)
- [Complementary Information Guided Occupancy Prediction via Multi-Level Representation Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13198/) (2025)
- [Invertible Neural Network Adapter for One-Step Flow Matching in Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19194/) (2026)
- [HARMONIC: A Content-Centric Cognitive Robotic Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13279/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Operating robots in open-ended scenarios with diverse tasks is a crucial research and application direction in robotics. While recent progress in natural language processing and large multimodal models has enhanced robots' ability to understand complex instructions, robot manipulation still faces the procedural skill dilemma and the declarative skill dilemma in open environments. Existing methods often compromise cognitive and executive capabilities. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose RoBridge, a hierarchical intelligent architecture for general robotic manipulation. It consists of a high-level cognitive planner (HCP) based on a large-scale pre-trained vision-language model (VLM), an invariant operable representation (IOR) serving as a symbolic bridge, and a generalist embodied agent (GEA). RoBridge maintains the declarative skill of VLM and unleashes the procedural skill of reinforcement learning, effectively bridging the gap between cognition and execution. RoBridge demonstrates significant performance improvements over existing baselines, achieving a 75% success rate on new tasks and an 83% average success rate in sim-to-real generalization using only five real-world data samples per task. This work represents a significant step towards integrating cognitive reasoning with physical execution in robotic systems, offering a new paradigm for general robotic manipulation.