BEHAVIOR Robot Suite: Streamlining Real-World Whole-Body Manipulation for Everyday Household Activities
Yunfan Jiang, Ruohan Zhang, Josiah Wong, Chen Wang, Yanjie Ze, Hang Yin, Cem Gokmen, Shuran Song, Jiajun Wu, Li Fei-Fei
2025-03-10
Summary
This paper talks about the BEHAVIOR Robot Suite (BRS), a new system designed to help robots perform everyday household tasks more effectively
What's the problem?
Robots struggle with common household chores because they need to coordinate both arms, move around precisely, and reach things in different places. Making robots that can do all this is hard, and teaching them to use their whole body for these tasks is even harder
What's the solution?
The researchers created BRS, which is a robot with two arms, wheels, and a flexible torso. They also made a way for people to control the robot easily to collect data on how to do tasks. Then, they developed a special program that helps the robot learn from this data to perform tasks on its own. They tested BRS on five tricky household tasks to see how well it could handle things like moving around the house, working with different objects, and operating in tight spaces
Why it matters?
This matters because it could lead to robots that can actually help us with housework in the future. By making the BRS system available for free online, the researchers are helping other scientists improve household robots faster. This could eventually make our lives easier by having robots that can do chores like cleaning, organizing, and even cooking
Abstract
Real-world household tasks present significant challenges for mobile manipulation robots. An analysis of existing robotics benchmarks reveals that successful task performance hinges on three key whole-body control capabilities: bimanual coordination, stable and precise navigation, and extensive end-effector reachability. Achieving these capabilities requires careful hardware design, but the resulting system complexity further complicates visuomotor policy learning. To address these challenges, we introduce the BEHAVIOR Robot Suite (BRS), a comprehensive framework for whole-body manipulation in diverse household tasks. Built on a bimanual, wheeled robot with a 4-DoF torso, BRS integrates a cost-effective whole-body teleoperation interface for data collection and a novel algorithm for learning whole-body visuomotor policies. We evaluate BRS on five challenging household tasks that not only emphasize the three core capabilities but also introduce additional complexities, such as long-range navigation, interaction with articulated and deformable objects, and manipulation in confined spaces. We believe that BRS's integrated robotic embodiment, data collection interface, and learning framework mark a significant step toward enabling real-world whole-body manipulation for everyday household tasks. BRS is open-sourced at https://behavior-robot-suite.github.io/