The rapid progress in AI and Robotics may lead to a profound societal transformation, as humans and robots begin to coexist within shared communities, introducing both opportunities and challenges. To explore this future, we present Virtual Community-an open-world platform for humans, robots, and society-built on a universal physics engine and grounded in real-world 3D scenes. With Virtual Community, we aim to enable the study of embodied social intelligence at scale. To support these, Virtual Community features: 1) An open-source multi-agent physics simulator that supports robots, humans, and their interactions within a society; 2) A large-scale, real-world aligned community generation pipeline, including vast outdoor space, diverse indoor scenes, and a community of grounded agents with rich characters and appearances. Leveraging Virtual Community, we propose two novel challenges. The Community Planning Challenge evaluates multi-agent reasoning and planning ability in open-world settings, such as cooperating to help agents with daily activities and efficiently connecting other agents. The Community Robot Challenge requires multiple heterogeneous robots to collaborate in solving complex open-world tasks. We evaluate various baselines on these tasks and demonstrate the challenges in both high-level open-world task planning and low-level cooperation controls. We hope that Virtual Community will unlock further study of human-robot coexistence within open-world environments.

翻译：人工智能与机器人技术的快速发展可能引发深刻的社会变革，随着人类与机器人开始在共享社区中共存，这既带来机遇也带来挑战。为探索这一未来，我们提出了虚拟社区——一个基于通用物理引擎并根植于真实世界三维场景的、面向人类、机器人及社会的开放世界平台。通过虚拟社区，我们旨在实现具身社会智能的大规模研究。为支持这一目标，虚拟社区具备以下特性：1）开源的多智能体物理模拟器，支持机器人、人类及其在社会中的交互；2）大规模、与现实世界对齐的社区生成流程，包含广阔的室外空间、多样化的室内场景，以及具有丰富角色与外观的具身智能体群体。借助虚拟社区，我们提出了两项新颖的挑战任务。社区规划挑战评估开放世界场景下的多智能体推理与规划能力，例如通过协作帮助智能体完成日常活动并高效连接其他智能体。社区机器人挑战要求多个异构机器人在开放世界中协作完成复杂任务。我们在此类任务上评估了多种基线方法，揭示了高层开放世界任务规划与底层协作控制中存在的挑战。我们希望虚拟社区能够推动开放世界环境下人机共存研究的进一步发展。