ContactBench 1.0: A Benchmark for Everyday Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

Abstract

Contact-rich manipulation underlies many everyday human activities, yet evaluating robots on such tasks remains difficult: the tasks involve diverse contact behaviors and are hard to reproduce across laboratories. Drawing on observations of everyday human manipulation, we identify eight essential skills that provide a practical framework for studying contact-rich manipulation. We introduce ContactBench 1.0, an extensible benchmark that instantiates these skills through 36 reference tasks and more than 40 object assets. The assets capture task-relevant geometry and contact behavior, can be fabricated reproducibly on consumer-grade 3D printers, and are each paired with a matching simulation model. Controlled task variations in both the real world and simulation enable evaluation of how well robot systems generalize. We evaluate recent representative vision-only and visual-tactile policy learning methods on six benchmark tasks. The results reveal that while vision-only policies struggle to perceive or react to contact events, visual-tactile policies do not meaningfully improve their performance, highlighting that contact-rich manipulation remains a significant challenge for current policy learning methods. By providing common task definitions alongside physical and simulated assets, ContactBench 1.0 offers a shared testbed for developing, evaluating, and comparing contact-rich manipulation systems. The benchmark will be open-sourced at https://jingyi-xiang.github.io/contactbench.

arXiv commentProject website: https://jingyi-xiang.github.io/contactbench