The advent of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) offers a promising technology to tackle the limitations of modular design in autonomous driving, which often falters in open-world scenarios requiring sustained environmental understanding and logical reasoning. Besides, embodied artificial intelligence facilitates policy optimization through closed-loop interactions to achieve the continuous learning capability, thereby advancing autonomous driving toward embodied intelligent (EI) driving. However, such capability will be constrained by relying solely on LMMs to enhance EI driving without joint decision-making. This article proposes a novel semantics and policy dual-driven hybrid decision framework to tackle this challenge, ensuring continuous learning and joint decision. The framework merges LMMs for semantic understanding and cognitive representation, and deep reinforcement learning for real-time policy optimization. This article particularly details the foundational principles of EI driving and LMMs, and also introduces the emerging opportunities this framework enables, encompassing potential benefits and representative use cases. The proposed framework, evaluated through a lane-change planning case study, achieves at least a 19% performance improvement over the baselines, as verified by simulations. Finally, key open challenges and future research directions are identified to guide subsequent work.
Humanoid robots must coordinate locomotion and manipulation in everyday environments, yet progress is difficult to assess across differing policies, controllers, and task settings. LocoManiLab provides an integrated testbed spanning data collection and generation, policy training, evaluation, and physical deployment. Its task suite covers 234 atomic and compositional tasks across five household scene categories, supported by 51.5 hours of simulated teleoperation. The evaluation covers twelve policies with a shared controller across task and scene splits and perturbation levels, two policies across five controllers, and studies of demonstration scale and data-source mixtures. Success rates fall on unseen tasks and scenes and generally decline as visual perturbations increase, with differences in generalization and robustness across policies. For data generation, a humanoid motion generation model is fine-tuned for loco-manipulation to study the alignment of its outputs with task execution requirements and its integration into the data generation pipeline. Three simulated loco-manipulation tasks closely match real-world setups, enabling evaluation of three policies in both domains. Similar policy rankings support the reliability of simulation-based evaluation.