Cited by 405Robot Manipulation and LearningReinforcement Learning in RoboticsDomain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning

RLBench: The Robot Learning Benchmark & Learning Environment

Open access
James, Stephen, Ma, Zicong, Arrojo, David Rovick, Davison, Andrew J.·2020·IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters

Abstract

We present a challenging new benchmark and learning-environment for robot learning: RLBench. The benchmark features 100 completely unique, hand-designed tasks, ranging in difficulty from simple target reaching and door opening to longer multi-stage tasks, such as opening an oven and placing a tray in it. We provide an array of both proprioceptive observations and visual observations, which include rgb, depth, and segmentation masks from an over-the-shoulder stereo camera and an eye-in-hand monocular camera. Uniquely, each task comes with an infinite supply of demos through the use of motion planners operating on a series of waypoints given during task creation time; enabling an exciting flurry of demonstration-based learning possibilities. RLBench has been designed with scalability in mind; new tasks, along with their motion-planned demos, can be easily created and then verified by a series of tools, allowing users to submit their own tasks to the RLBench task repository. This large-scale benchmark aims to accelerate progress in a number of vision-guided manipulation research areas, including: reinforcement learning, imitation learning, multi-task learning, geometric computer vision, and in particular, few-shot learning. With the benchmark's breadth of tasks and demonstrations, we propose the first large-scale few-shot challenge in robotics. We hope that the scale and diversity of RLBench offers unparalleled research opportunities in the robot learning community and beyond. Benchmarking code and videos can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/rlbench.

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Crossref · 10.1109/lra.2020.2974707

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  • The tasks and activities in existing simulation benchmarks are designed by researchers, and it remains unclear if they address actual human needs.

    “Inspiring as they are, the tasks and activities in those benchmarks are designed by researchers; it remains unclear if they are addressing the actual needs of humans.”
  • A large number of robot learning works and benchmarks use quasi-static tasks, making the system broadly applicable.

    “However, a large number of robot learning works and benchmarks use quasi-static tasks [1,3-7,14,18,19,22,30,33,51, 55, 56, 64-66], making the system broadly applicable.”
  • Some works have collected large datasets using pre-programmed demonstrators in simulation.

    “Some works have collected large datasets using pre-programmed demonstrators in simulation [18-22]”
  • Early robotic manipulation benchmarks provided reproducible test environments but were mostly limited to specific tasks and did not broadly evaluate robustness across varied conditions.

    “Early efforts (James et al., 2020; Mu et al., 2021; Liu et al., 2023) established reproducible environments for model testing. However, these benchmarks primarily focused on specific tasks, with a limited scope for evaluating robustness across diverse conditions.”

    From LIBERO-Plus: In-depth Robustness Analysis of Vision-Language-Action Models (2025) · cites this paper as James et al., 2020

  • Modality-specific encoders use Transformer for text, CNN for image, and RNN for audio, then align features through cross-modal attention.

    “using Transformer for text, CNN for image, RNN for audio, etc., and then performs feature alignment through Cross-modal Attention [306,307].”

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References 65 · Cited by 405

Authors
James, S., Ma, Z., Arrojo, D. R., & Davison, A. J.
Affiliations
Imperial College London (GB)
Venue
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
Published
2020-04
Volume
5
Issue
2
Pages
3019-3026
ISSN
  • 2377-3766 (ISSN-L)
  • 2377-3774
OpenAlex
W3007769740
Cited by
405
References
65
Citations by year
2026: 89 · 2025: 95 · 2024: 73 · 2023: 46 · 2022: 26 · 2021: 49 · 2020: 27
FWCI
18.27
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • Spiral (Imperial College London) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
Dyson Technology Ltd.
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Engineering › Control and Systems Engineering › Robot Manipulation and Learning
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Reinforcement Learning in Robotics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
Keywords
RLBench, vision-guided manipulation, few-shot learning, demonstration-based learning, motion planning, eye-in-hand camera, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, multi-task learning

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