EmbodiedIntentBench: Benchmarking Intent-Driven Runtime Adaptation for Mobile Robotic Missions

Rajat Bhattacharjya, Changwoon Lee, Hyeonjong Ju, Sing-Yao Wu, Hamidreza Alikhani +4

Mobile robotic sensing systems must adapt to operator requirements, limited resources, changing connectivity, and observation opportunities shaped by physical motion. Evaluating runtime strategies therefore requires assessing whether their decisions fulfill mission objectives, beyond isolated perception accuracy or execution efficiency. We present EmbodiedIntentBench, a benchmark for intent-driven runtime adaptation in mobile robotic missions. It represents mission intent through structured contracts for coverage, temporal evidence, reporting, urgency, and resources, and couples simulated unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) workloads with causal, resource-accounted execution. Computation decisions affect mission time, resource use, and which observations can contribute evidence. We evaluate fixed and adaptive perception strategies in multi-phase missions and under changing urgency, connectivity, and battery conditions. In the multi-phase Depot study, a configuration with 87.5% full-bank target recall across visible target observations completes only 1 of 16 missions, whereas a lower-recall configuration completes 14. In an ablation, ignoring execution-induced observation loss increases…