OopsieVerse: A Safety Benchmark with Damage-Aware Simulation for Robot Manipulation
2026-06-30 • Robotics
Robotics
AI summaryⓘ
The authors introduce OOPSIEVERSE, a simulation framework designed to help robots learn to avoid causing damage during household tasks. Their system converts physical interactions like force, heat, and liquids into measurable damage signals, allowing safer training without real-world risks. They built a damage detection tool called DAMAGESIM that works with different simulators and included tasks to test both task success and safety. The authors show that their framework can improve robot learning and evaluation by making safety a clear and measurable goal in simulation.
robotic manipulationsimulationdamage detectionreinforcement learningimitation learningphysics simulatortask safetysim-to-real transferOmniGibsonMuJoCo
Authors
Arnav Balaji, Arpit Bahety, Sriniket Ambatipudi, Daniel Lam, Junhong Xu, Roberto Martín-Martín
Abstract
While robotic manipulation capabilities have advanced rapidly, physical safety remains a major barrier to deploying household robots: task success is insufficient if the robot damages itself or its surroundings. Simulation offers a harm-free alternative to costly and dangerous real-world training and evaluation, yet existing simulators lack general mechanisms to detect, quantify, and represent damage. To address this gap, we introduce OOPSIEVERSE, a unified simulation framework and benchmark for damage-aware household manipulation. OOPSIEVERSE provides damage as an explicit, physically-grounded, and taskagnostic signal by converting sources such as contact forces, temperature changes, and liquid interactions into corresponding mechanical, thermal or fluid damage. OOPSIEVERSE comprises two core elements: (1) DAMAGESIM, a simulator-agnostic framework for detecting and quantifying damage during navigation and manipulation, and (2) a suite of household tasks designed to evaluate common damage modes and distinguish between task completion and safe execution. We demonstrate the generality of our framework by instantiating DAMAGESIM in two simulators with different physics backends, OmniGibson (Nvidia Omniverse) and RoboCasa (MuJoCo). We further showcase the utility of OOPSIEVERSE across multiple use cases, including (1) guiding safer demonstration collection via real-time damage feedback, (2) learning safer manipulation policies through damage-conditioned imitation learning and reinforcement learning, (3) benchmarking the safety of state-of-the-art Vision Language Action policies, and (4) improving real-world safety of sim-to-real transferred policies. Together, our results highlight the potential of OOPSIEVERSE as an open-source foundation for systematic, scalable research on safe robot manipulation. For code and more information, please refer to https://robin-lab.cs.utexas.edu/oopsieverse/