No More Blame Games for Robot Errors: Chen Li's World Model Is a Cure, But Who Writes the Prescription?

During a late-night warehouse drill, I witnessed an unmanned forklift suddenly "zigzag" in front of a shelf. It first identified a path, then abruptly emergency-braked as it approached the target, followed by frantic left-right swaying, as if weighing something up. In the end, it crashed into the shelf and knocked a box of goods to the floor. During the post-mortem, the team was in uproar: did the perception module mispredict the shelf's location, or did the decision module judge the current action's risk as too high? No one could say for sure. This phenomenon is extremely common in embodied AI, especially in end-to-end systems where "thinking" and "judging" are tied together in a black box. When accidents happen, developers can only rely on guessing to pinpoint the problem.