DuoBench: A Reproducible Benchmark for Bimanual Manipulation in Simulation and the Real World

It includes stage-conditional pass rates with confidence intervals as well as human-teleoperated datasets for all benchmark tasks. It comes from a paper posted to arXiv on 4 November 2026. Bimanual robot systems substantially expand manipulation capabilities, but coordinating two arms introduces additional control complexity and failure modes that are not well captured by existing benchmarks. We introduce DuoBench, an extensible benchmarking framework for bimanual manipulation policies on the FR3 Duo platform. DuoBench comprises eleven tasks spanning four coordination categories, implemented in simulation and partially replicated in the real world through reproducible task recipes with 3D-printable assets. In addition, we propose a stage-based evaluation scheme that supports fine-grained semantic failure analysis beyond binary success. We benchmark several imitation-learning and vision-language-action policies in simulation and on real hardware. Our results show that current policies remain challenged by bimanual manipulation, particularly at the beginning of interaction, during parallel arm execution, and in sim-to-real transfer settings. We further find that simulation reveals the same failure modes as real-world experiments. DuoBench provides a reproducible testbed for analyzing them and studying future methods for dual-arm policy learning. Code, datasets, and videos are available at https://duobench.github.io

Why it counts

It includes stage-conditional pass rates with confidence intervals as well as human-teleoperated datasets for all benchmark tasks. We benchmark several imitation-learning and vision-language-action policies in simulation and on real hardware.

Sources

Primary source: primary source

What is not known

This brief does not claim independent replication. Claims that appear only on X and not in the primary source stay unknown.