RobotAgentBench: Towards Open-world Robot Autonomy
Recent advances in vision-language-action (VLA) and world-action models (WAMs) have significantly improved robotic manipulation, yet deploying robots in the open world demands a higher level of autonomy beyond executing predefined tasks. Robot agents offer a promising paradigm for this transition, integrating task discovery, contextual reasoning, physical execution, and adaptive recovery into a closed interaction loop. However, existing benchmarks largely evaluate isolated capabilities, failing to capture the complexity of open-world robot autonomy. We introduce RobotAgentBench (RAB), a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating robot agents in realistic, open-world household environments. Through an agent-assisted, human-in-the-loop real-to-sim pipeline, RAB constructs 50 diverse household layouts with interactive objects and physically grounded tasks, encompassing 90 atomic tasks, 18 short-horizon tasks, 8 long-horizon tasks, and 4 open-ended scenarios. RAB provides a multi-level evaluation of robot agent capabilities: (1) task-level assessments systematically examine five complementary dimensions: task discovery, context reasoning, manipulation, failure recovery, and robustness; (2) scenario-level evaluation assesses how agents integrate these capabilities to autonomously fulfill high-level user needs. Furthermore, RAB enables systematic comparisons of standalone VLA/WAM models and diverse robot agent architectures under a unified planning-execution-verification framework. Extensive experiments reveal substantial gaps between manipulation and autonomy, demonstrate the advantages of agentic architectures and recursive self-improvement, and highlight the remaining challenges toward open-world robot autonomy.
Authors
- Ruobing Han (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3090-3951)
- Nan Fang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4119-0886)
- Lingjun Mao
- Gao Zhu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6635-8836)
- Ziqiao Xi
- Yifei Shao
- Kun Zhou
- Junbo Huang
- Xinkai Zou
- Wenpeng Xu
- Ziche Liu
- Jinglin Cao
- Hengyu Jin
- Lukun He
- Sibo Zhu
- Shuang Liang
- Ziming Xu
- Yiming Huang
- Wenyi Wu
- Biwei Huang
- Jinzhou Tang
- Yuchen Yan
- Xinyue Wang
- Songyao Jin
- Zijun Zhang
Publication Details
- Journal
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Published
- 2026-10-26
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2610.34649
- Primary Topic
- Robot Manipulation and Learning
- Type
- preprint