Harnessing Embodied Agents: Runtime Governance for Policy-Constrained Execution

TL;DR

This paper introduces a runtime governance framework for embodied agents, separating cognition from oversight to improve safety, control, and compliance during physical interactions.

Contribution

It formalizes a policy-constrained execution architecture with externalized governance, enhancing safety and auditability of embodied agents compared to embedded approaches.

Findings

96.2% interception of unauthorized actions

Reduced unsafe continuation from 100% to 22.2% under runtime drift

91.4% recovery success with full policy compliance

Abstract

Embodied agents are evolving from passive reasoning systems into active executors that interact with tools, robots, and physical environments. Once granted execution authority, the central challenge becomes how to keep actions governable at runtime. Existing approaches embed safety and recovery logic inside the agent loop, making execution control difficult to standardize, audit, and adapt. This paper argues that embodied intelligence requires not only stronger agents, but stronger runtime governance. We propose a framework for policy-constrained execution that separates agent cognition from execution oversight. Governance is externalized into a dedicated runtime layer performing policy checking, capability admission, execution monitoring, rollback handling, and human override. We formalize the control boundary among the embodied agent, Embodied Capability Modules (ECMs), and runtime governance layer, and validate through 1000 randomized simulation trials across three governance dimensions. Results show 96.2% interception of unauthorized actions, reduction of unsafe continuation from 100% to 22.2% under runtime drift, and 91.4% recovery success with full policy compliance, substantially outperforming all baselines (p<0.001). By reframing runtime governance as a first-class systems problem, this paper positions policy-constrained execution as a key design principle for embodied agent systems.