Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Competition at the 2024 IEEE/RAS International Conference on Robotics and Automation

Published

September 24, 2024

Author(s)

Berk Calli, Yu Sun, Kenneth Kimble, Kaiyu Hang, Máximo A. Roa Garzón, Victor-Louis De Gusseme, Salvatore D'Avella, Francis wyffels, Andrea Cavallaro, Alessio Xompero

Abstract

The Ninth Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Competition (RGMC) took place in Yokohama, Japan, during the 2024 IEEE/RAS International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). The series of RGMC events started in 2016 at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) with strong support from the conference's organization committee, and since then they have been held each year at ICRA or IROS [1]. Across the editions, RGMC engaged the community in solving the open challenges associated with various robotic grasping and manipulation tasks for manufacturing, service robots, and logistics, and in advancing research and technology towards more realistic scenarios that can be encountered in daily activities at home or in warehouses. These tasks include assembling and disassembling boards, hand-in-hand grasping, picking and placing various objects, pouring liquids into a cup, bin picking, rearranging and setting formal tables, folding and unfolding cloths, and receiving objects handed over by a person. The goal of RGMC across these tasks is to assess the autonomous manipulation capabilities of a robotic arm when dealing with unknown or novel objects with varying physical properties and when handling scenarios with various degrees of uncertainty caused by a cluttered scene, random initial configurations, or human behaviors when interacting with the robot. For example, objects can vary in their shapes, appearances, transparency, deformability, and weight. RGMC challenges participants to design solutions that can perform outside of their labs and controlled conditions, within a limited time, and in some cases adapt to changing conditions within a task. For this year's event in Yokohama, RGMC organized five tracks grouped into two categories: the Manufacturing Track and four Essential Skill Tracks. The Essential Skill Tracks include Cloth Manipulation, In-Hand Manipulation, Picking in Clutter, and Human-to-Robot Handovers. All tasks in the tracks are performed autonomously by the robot, without any human intervention. The tasks in all the tracks were co-developed based on the benchmarks published in the literature by the organizers and the benchmark's authors [2-4]. Table 1 lists the organizers of this year's RGMC. This event of RGMC attracted the interest of over 70 teams worldwide across the various competition tracks. Among the registered teams and through a reviewing process, 31 teams from 10 different countries were selected to participate in Yokohama, and only 20 teams could commit and complete the tracks on-site, with 3 teams participating in three tracks and 2 teams participating each in two tracks. Table 2 provides the list of tracks, the reference benchmarking protocol, and the teams who competed on-site for each track.

Citation

IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine

Pub Type

Others

Citation

Calli, B. , Sun, Y. , Kimble, K. , Hang, K. , Roa Garzón, M. , De Gusseme, V. , D'Avella, S. , wyffels, F. , Cavallaro, A. and Xompero, A. (2024), Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Competition at the 2024 IEEE/RAS International Conference on Robotics and Automation, IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine (Accessed November 23, 2024)