Coding Agents with an Obstacle-Aware Harness for Safe Robot Manipulation

TL;DR - SafeHarness improves the safety of coding agents for robot manipulation by separating obstacle-aware route planning from contact execution. It achieves 71.9% task success and 87.5% collision avoidance, outperforming the previous state of the art by 6.5 and 27.0 percentage points, respectively.

• Baseline coding agents collided with obstacles in most cases despite recognizing them and receiving explicit instructions not to touch them.
• The failure stemmed from planning: agents lacked clearing-route reasoning, replanning when routes became infeasible, and safety-aware contact selection.
• SafeHarness represents objects as bounding boxes, generates and verifies waypoint routes, replans when needed, and chooses collision-free contact positions.
• Compared with the same agent without the harnesses, task success increased by 2.3× and collision avoidance by 1.5×.