Embodied Operators and Benchmarking: Toward Reusable and Deployable Embodied Intelligence Systems
For researchers and engineers building embodied intelligence systems, this provides a conceptual framework and evaluation methodology to move beyond monolithic end-to-end models toward modular, deployable components.
This work defines and taxonomizes 'embodied operators' as reusable, composable modules for embodied intelligence systems, and proposes a multi-dimensional benchmark for evaluating them across correctness, efficiency, stability, and deployability. It aims to establish a foundation for scalable and verifiable embodied AI.
Embodied intelligence systems require not only end-to-end policy models, but also reusable functional modules that transform multimodal observations, robot states, human demonstrations, and task contexts into structured representations, decisions, trajectories, control references, and system services. This work defines these modules as embodied operators and studies them as independent yet composable units in embodied intelligence pipelines. We clarify their definition boundary, emphasizing task semantics, standardized input-output contracts, deployability, reusability, and multi-layer optimizability. We further construct a taxonomy covering five categories: detection and segmentation, spatial localization and 3D understanding, hand motion recovery, embodied foundation models and task-decision operators, and planning, control, and system support operators. For each category, we summarize representative functions, technical paradigms, application roles, and practical limitations. Beyond taxonomy, we propose a multi-dimensional benchmark framework that evaluates embodied operators in terms of correctness, end-to-end efficiency, resource usage, temporal stability, portability, interface compatibility, deployment reliability, and downstream task utility. We also discuss workflow-level operator acceleration and open challenges in operator composition, data standardization, world models, VLA safety, edge deployment, and real-world application value. Overall, this work argues that embodied operators should be optimized and evaluated as holistic deployable components, providing a foundation for reusable, scalable, and verifiable embodied intelligence systems.