FolDeX: A Physical-World Benchmark for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation of Deformable Objects

Abstract:Embodied AI, including vision-language-action and world-action models, must operate reliably in the physical world. Yet methods that perform well in simulation can degrade substantially on real robots, especially in long-horizon deformable-object manipulation, where policies must track changing states and execute reliable multi-stage bimanual interactions. Existing real-robot benchmarks mainly focus on short-horizon rigid-object tasks and offer limited coverage of long-horizon deformable manipulation. We introduce FolDeX, a physical-world benchmark built entirely from real-robot data, with garment folding as its primary task. Since real-robot data collection is costly, FolDeX studies how heterogeneous physical experience can be reused efficiently. The benchmark is organized around four research axes: leveraging human intervention and recovery data collected during deployment; transferring data across tasks, including across garment categories and from rigid to deformable-object manipulation; reusing data across scenes with changes in lighting, background, and layout; and transferring data across robotic embodiments. FolDeX provides 2,000+ hours of real-robot data spanning 20+ tasks and 10+ embodiments. We also establish a fair real-robot evaluation platform for externally submitted policies, with standardized tasks, held-out physical objects, controlled initializations, and a unified execution protocol. The platform is publicly accessible at this https URL. We hope FolDeX will serve as a unified testbed for heterogeneous real-robot data reuse and reliable long-horizon deformable manipulation.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2609.10243 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.10243v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.10243 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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