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

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
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RobotAgentBench: Towards Open-world Robot Autonomy

Ruobing Han, Nan Fang, Lingjun Mao, Gao Zhu et al.
arXiv (Cornell University)
Robot Manipulation and Learning
preprint

RobotAgentBench: Towards Open-world Robot Autonomy

Ruobing Han, Nan Fang, Lingjun Mao, Gao Zhu, 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
preprint en

Abstract

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.

arXiv (Cornell University)
Robot Manipulation and Learning
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