BiCoord: A Bimanual Manipulation Benchmark towards Long-Horizon Spatial-Temporal Coordination

arXiv cs.RO / 4/8/2026

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Key Points

  • BiCoord is introduced as a new benchmark for bimanual (two-arm) robotic manipulation that targets long-horizon tasks with tight spatial-temporal coordination rather than short-horizon or loosely coupled settings.
  • The benchmark includes tasks requiring continuous inter-arm dependency and dynamic role exchange across multiple sub-goals, aiming to better reflect real-world bimanual behavior.
  • The paper proposes quantitative metrics to evaluate coordination from temporal, spatial, and combined spatial-temporal perspectives, supporting more systematic measurement of cooperative performance.
  • Experiments indicate that several representative policies (DP, RDT, Pi0, OpenVLA-OFT) underperform on long-duration and highly coupled tasks, highlighting fundamental challenges in achieving tight long-horizon coordination.
  • The authors release datasets, code, and supplements via the project website to enable future research on coordination-aware robotic learning.

Abstract

Bimanual manipulation, i.e., the coordinated use of two robotic arms to complete tasks, is essential for achieving human-level dexterity in robotics. Recent simulation benchmarks, e.g., RoboTwin and RLBench2, have advanced data-driven learning for bimanual manipulation. However, existing tasks are short-horizon and only loosely coordinated, failing to capture the spatial-temporal coupling inherent in real-world bimanual behaviors. To address this gap, we introduce BiCoord, a benchmark for long-horizon and tightly coordinated bimanual manipulation. Specifically, BiCoord comprises diverse tasks that require continuous inter-arm dependency and dynamic role exchange across multiple sub-goals. Also, we propose a suite of quantitative metrics that evaluate coordination from temporal, spatial, and spatial-temporal perspectives, enabling systematic measurement of bimanual cooperation. Experimental results show that representative manipulation policies, e.g., DP, RDT, Pi0, and OpenVLA-OFT, struggle with long-duration and highly coupled tasks, revealing fundamental challenges in achieving long-horizon and tight coordination tasks. We hope BiCoord can serve as a foundation for studying long-horizon cooperative manipulation and inspire future research on coordination-aware robotic learning. All datasets, codes and supplements could be found at https://buaa-colalab.github.io/BiCoord/.