Abstract
Artificial intelligence is beginning to automate scientific discovery, yet physical robot-policy research still relies on scientists and engineers to interpret experimental failures and decide how controllers should be revised. We present EndoRSI (Endoscopic Recursive Self-Improvement), a human-governed, self-improving robotic research system in which the embedded EndoForge coding agent iteratively develops and refines endoscopic robot policies using evidence from physical experiments. Physical execution remains isolated within a safety-constrained runtime under human authorisation. In motorised endoscopy, validation evidence first caused the agent to reject an initial action representation, while subsequent physical experiments falsified an offline-supported insertion strategy by revealing hazardous closed-loop behaviour absent from the source data. Failed physical rollouts were then incorporated into policy revision; insertion success subsequently increased from 2/21 in the first generation to 17/21 in the fourth. The frozen final policy retained competence across visual and hardware shifts and was the best performing autonomous policy across six independent ex-vivo porcine specimens. These results show that physical robot interaction can serve as experimental evidence for agent-driven robot policy research.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13376
