KinDER: A Physical Reasoning Benchmark for Robot Learning and Planning

TL;DR

KinDER is a comprehensive benchmark with environments and tools designed to evaluate and advance physical reasoning capabilities in robot learning and planning, highlighting current method limitations.

Contribution

Introduces KinDER, a new benchmark with environments, evaluation suite, and baseline methods for physical reasoning in robotics, fully open-sourced.

Findings

Existing methods struggle with many KinDER environments.

KinDER isolates core physical reasoning challenges.

Real-to-sim-to-real experiments assess simulation fidelity.

Abstract

Robotic systems that interact with the physical world must reason about kinematic and dynamic constraints imposed by their own embodiment, their environment, and the task at hand. We introduce KinDER, a benchmark for Kinematic and Dynamic Embodied Reasoning that targets physical reasoning challenges arising in robot learning and planning. KinDER comprises 25 procedurally generated environments, a Gymnasium-compatible Python library with parameterized skills and demonstrations, and a standardized evaluation suite with 13 implemented baselines spanning task and motion planning, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, and foundation-model-based approaches. The environments are designed to isolate five core physical reasoning challenges: basic spatial relations, nonprehensile multi-object manipulation, tool use, combinatorial geometric constraints, and dynamic constraints, disentangled from perception, language understanding, and application-specific complexity. Empirical evaluation shows that existing methods struggle to solve many of the environments, indicating substantial gaps in current approaches to physical reasoning. We additionally include real-to-sim-to-real experiments on a mobile manipulator to assess the correspondence between simulation and real-world physical interaction. KinDER is fully open-sourced and intended to enable systematic comparison across diverse paradigms for advancing physical reasoning in robotics. Website and code: https://prpl-group.com/kinder-site/