Agents & Tool Use · 2022

Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances (SayCan)

Michael Ahn, Anthony Brohan, Noah Brown, Karol Hausman

Grounded a language model’s plans in what a robot can actually do by combining the model’s task knowledge with learned affordance values, letting an LLM direct real-world robotic behavior.

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Plain-language summary

SayCan scores candidate skills by multiplying an LLM’s estimate that a skill helps achieve the instruction with a value function’s estimate that the skill is currently feasible, so the robot picks useful and possible actions. This let a robot carry out long natural-language instructions in a kitchen. It was an influential early bridge from language models to embodied action.

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Provenance

Record ID
P-521
Record created
2026-07-13
Last reviewed
2026-07-14
Record version
2

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