StereoPolicy: Improving Robotic Manipulation Policies via Stereo Perception
About
Recent advances in robot imitation learning have produced powerful visuomotor policies that manipulate diverse objects from visual inputs. However, monocular observations lack depth information, which is critical for precise manipulation in cluttered or geometrically complex scenes. Explicit depth maps and point clouds are often noisy and fragile in real-world manipulation. We introduce StereoPolicy, a visuomotor policy learning framework that directly leverages synchronized stereo image pairs to improve geometric reasoning without constructing explicit 3D representations. StereoPolicy processes each image with pretrained 2D vision encoders and fuses left-right features through a cross-attention-based Stereo Transformer, capturing spatial correspondence and disparity cues implicitly. The framework integrates with diffusion-based and pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) policies, delivering consistent improvements over RGB, RGB-D, point cloud, and multi-view baselines across three simulation benchmarks and seven real-robot tabletop and bimanual mobile manipulation tasks. Our results show that stereo vision bridges 2D pretrained representations and 3D geometric understanding for robotic manipulation.