UniDomain: Pretraining a Unified PDDL Domain from Real-World Demonstrations for Generalizable Robot Task Planning

arXiv cs.RO / 4/21/2026

📰 NewsIdeas & Deep AnalysisModels & Research

Key Points

  • The paper introduces UniDomain, a framework for generalizable robotic task planning that pre-trains a unified PDDL domain from real-world robot manipulation demonstrations.
  • UniDomain learns symbolic structure by extracting atomic domains from 12,393 manipulation videos, assembling them into a large unified domain with 3,137 operators, 2,875 predicates, and 16,481 causal links.
  • For a given target task class, it retrieves relevant atomics and fuses them into high-quality meta-domains to enable compositional generalization and better long-horizon planning.
  • Experiments across diverse real-world tasks reportedly enable zero-shot solving of complex unseen tasks, improving task success by up to 58% and plan optimality by up to 160% versus LLM and LLM-PDDL baselines.
  • The work targets key limitations of prior LLM/VLM-augmented planning approaches, especially difficulties with long-horizon symbolic structure and grounding to real-world constraints from language and vision.

Abstract

Robotic task planning in real-world environments requires reasoning over implicit constraints from language and vision. While LLMs and VLMs offer strong priors, they struggle with long-horizon structure and symbolic grounding. Existing methods that combine LLMs with symbolic planning often rely on handcrafted or narrow domains, limiting generalization. We propose UniDomain, a framework that pre-trains a PDDL domain from robot manipulation demonstrations and applies it for online robotic task planning. It extracts atomic domains from 12,393 manipulation videos to form a unified domain with 3137 operators, 2875 predicates, and 16481 causal edges. Given a target class of tasks, it retrieves relevant atomics from the unified domain and systematically fuses them into high-quality meta-domains to support compositional generalization in planning. Experiments on diverse real-world tasks show that UniDomain solves complex, unseen tasks in a zero-shot manner, achieving up to 58% higher task success and 160% improvement in plan optimality over state-of-the-art LLM and LLM-PDDL baselines.