RoCo Challenge at AAAI 2026: Benchmarking Robotic Collaborative Manipulation for Assembly Towards Industrial Automation

Embodied Artificial Intelligence (EAI) is rapidly developing, gradually subverting previous autonomous systems' paradigms from isolated perception to integrated, continuous action. This transition is highly significant for industrial robotic manipulation, promising to free human workers from repetitive, dangerous daily labor. To benchmark and advance this capability, we introduce the Robotic Collaborative Assembly Assistance (RoCo) Challenge with a dataset towards simulation and real-world assembly manipulation. Set against the backdrop of human-centered manufacturing, this challenge focuses on a high-precision planetary gearbox assembly task, a demanding yet highly representative operation in modern industry. Built upon a self-developed data collection, training, and evaluation system in Isaac Sim, and utilizing a dual-arm robot for real-world deployment, the challenge operates in two phases. The Simulation Round defines fine-grained task phases for step-wise scoring to handle the long-horizon nature of the assembly. The Real-World Round mirrors this evaluation with physical gearbox components and high-quality teleoperated datasets. The core tasks require assembling an epicyclic gearbox from scratch, including mounting three planet gears, a sun gear, and a ring gear. Attracting over 60 teams and 170+ participants from more than 10 countries, the challenge yielded highly effective solutions, most notably ARC-VLA and RoboCola. Results demonstrate that a dual-model framework for long-horizon multi-task learning is highly effective, and the strategic utilization of recovery-from-failure curriculum data is a critical insight for successful deployment. This report outlines the competition setup, evaluation approach, key findings, and future directions for industrial EAI. Our dataset, CAD files, code, and evaluation results can be found at: https://rocochallenge.github.io/RoCo2026/.

SafeBimanual: Diffusion-based Trajectory Optimization for Safe Bimanual Manipulation

Bimanual manipulation has been widely applied in household services and manufacturing, which enables the complex task completion with coordination requirements. Recent diffusion-based policy learning approaches have achieved promising performance in modeling action distributions for bimanual manipulation. However, they ignored the physical safety constraints of bimanual manipulation, which leads to the dangerous behaviors with damage to robots and objects. To this end, we propose a test-time trajectory optimization framework named SafeBimanual for any pre-trained diffusion-based bimanual manipulation policies, which imposes the safety constraints on bimanual actions to avoid dangerous robot behaviors with improved success rate. Specifically, we design diverse cost functions for safety constraints in different dual-arm cooperation patterns including avoidance of tearing objects and collision between arms and objects, which optimizes the manipulator trajectories with guided sampling of diffusion denoising process. Moreover, we employ a vision-language model (VLM) to schedule the cost functions by specifying keypoints and corresponding pairwise relationship, so that the optimal safety constraint is dynamically generated in the entire bimanual manipulation process. SafeBimanual demonstrates superiority on 8 simulated tasks in RoboTwin with a 13.7% increase in success rate and a 18.8% reduction in unsafe interactions over state-of-the-art diffusion-based methods. Extensive experiments on 4 real-world tasks further verify its practical value by improving the success rate by 32.5%.