HARP-Bench: Benchmarking Robot Manipulation Around Active Humans

Qinhong Zhou, Riley Zong, Chunru Lin, Diyi Hu, Shivraj Singh Bhatti +4

Recent robot manipulation benchmarks have enabled systematic evaluation of general-purpose robot policies across diverse objects, scenes, instructions, and embodiments. However, most existing benchmarks still assume that the robot is the only active agent and that task semantics are determined primarily by the instruction and object state. This assumption overlooks a common source of real-world variation: humans actively sharing the workspace. In such settings, humans may reveal an implicit goal, complete part of the task, temporarily change object availability, or constrain safe robot motion while working nearby. We introduce HARP-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating robot manipulation policies in workspaces shared with active humans. HARP-Bench treats human activity as part of the manipulation problem, rather than as background scene variation. It organizes human-present manipulation into four conditions: Cueing, Contribution, Interruption, and Co-presence. These conditions are instantiated through everyday manipulation tasks, including paired human-present variants for controlled comparison with standard manipulation. HARP-Bench also provides a demonstration-generation pipeline…