cs.RONov 5, 2026

RoboARCade: Benchmarking Agentic Robot Control

Authors: Satvik Sharma, Hengyuan Hu, Mihika Kamat, Dorsa Sadigh, Jeannette Bohg

Organizations: Stanford University

Abstract

Improvements in multi-modal capabilities have enabled agents to act directly as robot policies, a setting we refer to as agentic robot control (ARC). We introduce RoboARCade, a benchmark of long-horizon manipulation tasks across three embodiments designed to test in-context adaptation, memory, and reasoning for precise control. The tasks build on existing open-source benchmarks, which we make harder by widening the range of initial conditions. RoboARCade is easy to use and extend: all tasks run on a single simulation backend, MuJoCo, each task is a self-contained data pack, and agents connect through interchangeable interfaces, so new tasks, agents, and interfaces can be added independently. The benchmark separates leading agents: GPT-6 Astra achieves 49.8% compared with 43.6% for Claude Fable 5.1, leaving substantial room for improvement. Comparing two interfaces, we find that a richer visual interface adds only 1.5 to 6.8 points at 1.7 to 2.3 times the cost. Failures stem mostly from choosing a poor manipulation strategy or executing a good one imprecisely, rarely from misunderstanding the scene, and agents incorrectly claim success on 24% to 39% of attempted subtasks. Agents can also improve without human input: one successful demonstration in context raises Astra's score from 53.5% to 73.0% on a five-task subset, and a prompt the agent writes and revises itself reaches 72.0%. Code, videos and full traces are available at roboarcade.org.

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