# PerAct2: Benchmarking and Learning for Robotic Bimanual Manipulation Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.00278 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00278/

## Key facts

- Cited by 37 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13705/) (2023)
- [What Matters in Learning from Offline Human Demonstrations for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03298/) (2021)
- [RLBench: The Robot Learning Benchmark & Learning Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12271/) (2019)
- [ManiSkill2: A Unified Benchmark for Generalizable Manipulation Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04659/) (2023)
- [ARCTIC: A Dataset for Dexterous Bimanual Hand-Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13662/) (2022)
- [Orbit: A Unified Simulation Framework for Interactive Robot Learning Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04195/) (2023)
- [Towards Human-Level Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08686/) (2022)
- [RoboPianist: Dexterous Piano Playing with Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04150/) (2023)
- [Robot Cooking with Stir-fry: Bimanual Non-prehensile Manipulation of Semi-fluid Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05960/) (2022)
- [Long-Horizon Multi-Robot Rearrangement Planning for Construction Assembly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02489/) (2021)
- [RB2: Robotic Manipulation Benchmarking with a Twist](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08098/) (2022)
- [A Memory System of a Robot Cognitive Architecture and its Implementation in ArmarX](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02241/) (2022)
- [Coarse-to-fine Q-attention with Tree Expansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12471/) (2022)
- [Carrying the uncarriable: a deformation-agnostic and human-cooperative framework for unwieldy objects using multiple robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14009/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [DreamVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model Dreamed with Comprehensive World Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04447/) (2025)
- [Large VLM-based Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13073/) (2025)
- [WorldEval: World Model as Real-World Robot Policies Evaluator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19017/) (2025)
- [SoFar: Language-Grounded Orientation Bridges Spatial Reasoning and Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13143/) (2025)
- [VLA-OS: Structuring and Dissecting Planning Representations and Paradigms in Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17561/) (2025)
- [G3Flow: Generative 3D Semantic Flow for Pose-aware and Generalizable Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18369/) (2024)
- [RoboEval: Where Robotic Manipulation Meets Structured and Scalable Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00435/) (2025)
- [VoxAct-B: Voxel-Based Acting and Stabilizing Policy for Bimanual Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04152/) (2024)
- [AnyBimanual: Transferring Unimanual Policy for General Bimanual Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06779/) (2024)
- [Do You Know Where Your Camera Is? View-Invariant Policy Learning with Camera Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02268/) (2025)
- [TwinVLA: Data-Efficient Bimanual Manipulation with Twin Single-Arm Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05275/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Bimanual Robotic Manipulation: Learning with Decoupled Interaction Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09186/) (2025)
- [GP3: A 3D Geometry-Aware Policy with Multi-View Images for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15733/) (2025)
- [PEEK: Guiding and Minimal Image Representations for Zero-Shot Generalization of Robot Manipulation Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18282/) (2025)
- [ManiGaussian++: General Robotic Bimanual Manipulation with Hierarchical Gaussian World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19842/) (2025)
- [EmbodiedVSR: Dynamic Scene Graph-Guided Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Visual Spatial Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11089/) (2025)
- [SafeBimanual: Diffusion-based Trajectory Optimization for Safe Bimanual Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18268/) (2025)
- [Abstracting Robot Manipulation Skills via Mixture-of-Experts Diffusion Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21251/) (2026)
- [D-CODA: Diffusion for Coordinated Dual-Arm Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04860/) (2025)
- [ROPA: Synthetic Robot Pose Generation for RGB-D Bimanual Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19454/) (2025)
- [Towards a Generalizable Bimanual Foundation Policy via Flow-based Video Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24156/) (2025)
- [R3DP: Real-Time 3D-Aware Policy for Embodied Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14498/) (2026)
- [Bench2Dex: Benchmarking Visuo-Tactile Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation Across Dexterous Hands](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.15726/) (2026)
- [SR3D: Unleashing Single-view 3D Reconstruction for Transparent and Specular Object Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24305/) (2025)
- [Large Pre-Trained Models for Bimanual Manipulation in 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20579/) (2025)
- [Improving Robustness to Out-of-Distribution States in Imitation Learning via Deep Koopman-Boosted Diffusion Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00555/) (2025)
- [Embodiment Transfer Learning for Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01224/) (2025)
- [Bimanual Robot Manipulation via Multi-Agent In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20348/) (2026)
- [CUBic: Coordinated Unified Bimanual Perception and Control Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13452/) (2026)
- [See Selectively, Act Adaptively: Dual-Level Structural Decomposition for Bimanual Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13279/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Bimanual manipulation is challenging due to precise spatial and temporal coordination required between two arms. While there exist several real-world bimanual systems, there is a lack of simulated benchmarks with a large task diversity for systematically studying bimanual capabilities across a wide range of tabletop tasks. This paper addresses the gap by extending RLBench to bimanual manipulation. We open-source our code and benchmark comprising 13 new tasks with 23 unique task variations, each requiring a high degree of coordination and adaptability. To kickstart the benchmark, we extended several state-of-the art methods to bimanual manipulation and also present a language-conditioned behavioral cloning agent -- PerAct2, which enables the learning and execution of bimanual 6-DoF manipulation tasks. Our novel network architecture efficiently integrates language processing with action prediction, allowing robots to understand and perform complex bimanual tasks in response to user-specified goals. Project website with code is available at: http://bimanual.github.io