Household Tasks

Everyday activities like tidying, cleaning, laundry, and cooking in a real home — the main target setting for general-purpose robots.

Household tasks broadly cover the everyday activities carried out in a home: clearing a table, loading dishes into a dishwasher, wiping a counter, folding laundry, making a bed. A home is a classic unstructured environment: every household has a different layout, different objects, and different lighting, items get left in all kinds of places, tasks are often made up of many steps, and they frequently involve deformable objects such as clothing and articulated objects such as drawers and cabinet doors. Because of this, whether a robot can do housework in a home it has never seen is often treated as a litmus test for a general-purpose robot's generalization ability. The BEHAVIOR-1K benchmark, from Stanford and others, defines 1,000 everyday activities based on a survey of what people wanted robots to do for them, and evaluates them in the OmniGibson simulator; in April 2025, Physical Intelligence's π0.5 demonstrated cleaning a kitchen or bedroom in entirely new houses.

ExampleIn a house the robot has never entered before, it puts scattered clothes into a laundry basket, loads dishes into the sink, and then wipes down the counter.

Related

Long-horizon Task · Mobile Manipulation · Structured vs. Unstructured Environment · BEHAVIOR-1K (BEHAVIOR Challenge) · π0.5 · Garment Manipulation

Sources

BEHAVIOR-1K: A Human-Centered, Embodied AI Benchmark with 1,000 Everyday Activities and Realistic Simulation (arXiv 2403.09227)
π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalization (arXiv 2504.16054)

As of

2025-04