The state banquet is the spectacular showstopper of a state visit, a glittering feast with speeches, royal toasts, trumpet fanfares and fancy food and wine. It's diplomacy served up with fine dining. A cut-glass shock-and-awe approach to hospitality designed to make a visiting leader like President Trump feel special. The setting in St George's Hall inside Windsor Castle is a remarkable sight, a mix of medieval banquet and Harry Potter film. Elaborately uniformed staff around the hall are as drilled as the soldiers who have been on parade during the day.

We introduce BiGym, a new benchmark and learning environment for mobile bi-manual demo-driven robotic manipulation. BiGym features 40 diverse tasks set in home environments, ranging from simple target reaching to complex kitchen cleaning. To capture the real-world performance accurately, we provide human-collected demonstrations for each task, reflecting the diverse modalities found in real-world robot trajectories. BiGym supports a variety of observations, including proprioceptive data and visual inputs such as RGB, and depth from 3 camera views. To validate the usability of BiGym, we thoroughly benchmark the state-of-the-art imitation learning algorithms and demo-driven reinforcement learning algorithms within the environment and discuss the future opportunities.

Those who are a stickler for etiquette should look away now. That's because we've all been dining the wrong way and should be eating with our hands, according to a psychologist. Professor Charles Spence, from the University of Oxford, said giving up cutlery is the secret to enjoying food. He says eating with our hands can'heighten the dining experience' – even for meals like pasta and messy curries. Those who are a stickler for etiquette should look away now.

Robotics lends a helping hand. Using a brain-controlled exoskeleton, six paralysed people regained the ability to do everyday tasks such as using cutlery or signing documents. The system required no surgery and is mobile enough to use outside a laboratory. "The patients were amazed by what they could do with the system," says Surjo Soekadar from the University Hospital of Tübingen, Germany. "Previously, they couldn't have a meal with a knife and fork, so changing that was amazing for them."