While this is a real mobile robot, this does not really address my concerns: 1) It is not navigating in a open environment, rather a constrained workspace just like other manipulation demos. 2) They're not using any visual information for task planning and reasoning, rather doing low level control for locomotion.

Of course, I cannot emphasize enough that this is a good research paper! We're just really really far away mobile robots trained end-to-end with RL for doing any kind of tasks in open environments. And that's fine. It means more cool research to do for me.