Leveraging VR Robot Games to Facilitate Data Collection for Embodied Intelligence Tasks

arXiv cs.RO / 4/21/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper proposes a gamified, Unity-based VR framework to collect embodied interaction demonstrations at scale, addressing the cost and limited accessibility of conventional data-collection interfaces.
  • It integrates procedural scene generation, VR control of a humanoid robot, automatic task evaluation, and trajectory logging into a single end-to-end workflow.
  • A trash pick-and-place prototype is used to validate the pipeline, showing that collected demonstrations cover a broad portion of the state-action space.
  • The authors find that higher task difficulty increases motion intensity and encourages more extensive exploration of the robot arm’s workspace, suggesting controllable data diversity.
  • Overall, the work argues that game-oriented virtual environments can be an effective and extensible approach for embodied intelligence data collection.

Abstract

Collecting embodied interaction data at scale remains costly and difficult due to the limited accessibility of conventional interfaces. We present a gamified data collection framework based on Unity that combines procedural scene generation, VR-based humanoid robot control, automatic task evaluation, and trajectory logging. A trash pick-and-place task prototype is developed to validate the full workflow.Experimental results indicate that the collected demonstrations exhibit broad coverage of the state-action space, and that increasing task difficulty leads to higher motion intensity as well as more extensive exploration of the arm's workspace. The proposed framework demonstrates that game-oriented virtual environments can serve as an effective and extensible solution for embodied data collection.