RoboBenchMart: Benchmarking Robots in Retail Environment

TL;DR

RoboBenchMart introduces a realistic retail environment benchmark for robotic manipulation, emphasizing complex tasks with cluttered grocery items to advance research in retail automation.

Contribution

This paper presents RoboBenchMart, a comprehensive benchmark suite for retail robotics, including environment generation, evaluation tools, and baseline models, addressing limitations of existing simplified benchmarks.

Findings

Current state-of-the-art models struggle with retail tasks.

The benchmark reveals significant challenges in cluttered retail environments.

Provides tools and baselines to facilitate future research.

Abstract

Most existing robotic manipulation benchmarks focus on simplified tabletop scenarios, typically involving a stationary robotic arm interacting with various objects on a flat surface. To address this limitation, we introduce RoboBenchMart, a more challenging and realistic benchmark designed for dark store environments, where robots must perform complex manipulation tasks with diverse grocery items. This setting presents significant challenges, including dense object clutter and varied spatial configurations -- with items positioned at different heights, depths, and in close proximity. By targeting the retail domain, our benchmark addresses a setting with strong potential for near-term automation impact. We demonstrate that current state-of-the-art generalist models struggle to solve even common retail tasks. To support further research, we release the RoboBenchMart suite, which includes a procedural store layout generator, a trajectory generation pipeline, evaluation tools and fine-tuned baseline models.