HumanoidBench: Simulated Humanoid Benchmark for Whole-Body Locomotion and Manipulation

Abstract

Humanoid robots hold great promise in assisting humans in diverse environments and tasks, due to their flexibility and adaptability leveraging human-like morphology. However, research in humanoid robots is often bottlenecked by the costly and fragile hardware setups. To accelerate algorithmic research in humanoid robots, we present a high-dimensional, simulated robot learning benchmark, HumanoidBench, featuring a humanoid robot equipped with dexterous hands and a variety of challenging whole-body manipulation and locomotion tasks. Our findings reveal that state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms struggle with most tasks, whereas a hierarchical learning approach achieves superior performance when supported by robust low-level policies, such as walking or reaching. With HumanoidBench, we provide the robotics community with a platform to identify the challenges arising when solving diverse tasks with humanoid robots, facilitating prompt verification of algorithms and ideas. The open-source code is available at https://humanoid-bench.github.io.