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Main Authors: Huang, Yixuan, Li, Bowen, Saxena, Vaibhav, Liang, Yichao, Mishra, Utkarsh Aashu, Ji, Liang, Zha, Lihan, Wu, Jimmy, Kumar, Nishanth, Scherer, Sebastian, Xu, Danfei, Silver, Tom
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.25788
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author Huang, Yixuan
Li, Bowen
Saxena, Vaibhav
Liang, Yichao
Mishra, Utkarsh Aashu
Ji, Liang
Zha, Lihan
Wu, Jimmy
Kumar, Nishanth
Scherer, Sebastian
Xu, Danfei
Silver, Tom
author_facet Huang, Yixuan
Li, Bowen
Saxena, Vaibhav
Liang, Yichao
Mishra, Utkarsh Aashu
Ji, Liang
Zha, Lihan
Wu, Jimmy
Kumar, Nishanth
Scherer, Sebastian
Xu, Danfei
Silver, Tom
contents 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/
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_25788
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle KinDER: A Physical Reasoning Benchmark for Robot Learning and Planning
Huang, Yixuan
Li, Bowen
Saxena, Vaibhav
Liang, Yichao
Mishra, Utkarsh Aashu
Ji, Liang
Zha, Lihan
Wu, Jimmy
Kumar, Nishanth
Scherer, Sebastian
Xu, Danfei
Silver, Tom
Robotics
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/
title KinDER: A Physical Reasoning Benchmark for Robot Learning and Planning
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.25788