Benchmarking Initiative

Manipulation and Grasping

The main reason for selecting this area of robotics has been the fact that there already existed a Special Interest Group in this area in the framework of EURON-I. The previous existence of this community greatly simplifies the organization of meetings and discussions.

The robotics community has always recognized as a key area that of the interaction of a robotic manipulation system with its environment. Although this is a very interesting and central issue the involved problems, both at the technical and methodological level, still represent a limiting factor in a number of important cases not only in standard industrial applications but also in non-conventional uses (e.g. space, soft material, dexterous manipulation, etc.). Among the relevant research fields interested in this area, one can enumerate the following: advanced sensors (e.g. tactile, force/torque, vision, etc.), mechanical structures and devices (e.g. parallel, redundant, flexible, etc.), planning, control, optimization. Due to these reasons, the complexity to advance in the definition of benchmarks is acknowledged as a very difficult task, which is also the case for other areas of robotics.

Nevertheless, the majority of experts in this field agree that such a definition would be desirable and less difficult to achieve if we try to define a benchmark for each elemental topic within this very large domain: such as mechanical design, control algorithms, sensors, artificial intelligence strategies, etc

In particular, these tentative benchmarks should include well-defined tasks and rules, methodologies, design for experiments, calibration process for instrumental devices, etc. Moreover, the algorithmic performance should be tested on a variety of different hardware platforms and vice versa. For instance, a hand can perform better than another one, also with the same control algorithm, since it is more suitable for a given task, and so on.

Finally, some ideas about specific benchmarks could be related with the following three tests:

• Test-1. Grasp and re-grasp of a given object (both regularly or no regularly shaped) The metrics here would be: Capability of disturbance rejection; Ability of fine manipulation; Complexity of the design; Force/Form closure capabilities.
• Test-2. After a pick and place operation is well defined, the task is divided into two stages: (1) picking phase , and (2) holding phase . In (1) the evaluation concerns of measuring the statically applied picking forces to the grasped object (e.g. rigid, flexible, with different geometry, etc.). While, in (2) the measure of the maximum acceleration, in different moving directions, permitted before to lose the grasped object would be an interesting metric.
• Test-3. Take a set of objects and replace them as soon as possible. Here the metric would be time and statistics of failure.