Empirical Inference Conference Paper 2022

Real Robot Challenge: A Robotics Competition in the Cloud

Trifingerpro boxes one open small

Dexterous manipulation remains an open problem in robotics. To coordinate efforts of the research community towards tackling this problem, we propose a shared benchmark. We designed and built robotic platforms that are hosted at the MPI-IS and can be accessed remotely. Each platform consists of three robotic fingers that are capable of dexterous object manipulation. Users are able to control the platforms remotely by submitting code that is executed automatically, akin to a computational cluster. Using this setup, i) we host robotics competitions, where teams from anywhere in the world access our platforms to tackle challenging tasks ii) we publish the datasets collected during these competitions (consisting of hundreds of robot hours), and iii) we give researchers access to these platforms for their own projects.

Author(s): Bauer, Stefan and Wüthrich, Manuel and Widmaier, Felix and Buchholz, Annika and Stark, Sebastian and Goyal, Anirudh and Steinbrenner, Thomas and Akpo, Joel and Joshi, Shruti and Berenz, Vincent and Agrawal, Vaibhav and Funk, Niklas and Urain, Julen and Peters, Jan and Watson, Joe and Chen, Claire and Srinivasan, Krishnan and Zhang, Junwu and Zhang, Jeffrey and Walter, Matthew and Madan, Rishabh and Yoneda, Takuma and Yarats, Denis and Allshire, Arthur and Gordon, Ethan and Bhattacharjee, Tapomayukh and Srinivasa, Siddhartha and Garg, Animesh and Maeda, Takahiro and Sikchi, Harshit and Wang, Jilong and Yao, Qingfeng and Yang, Shuyu and McCarthy, Robert and Sanchez, Francisco and Wang, Qiang and Bulens, David and McGuinness, Kevin and O’Connor, Noel and Stephen, Redmond and Schölkopf, Bernhard
Book Title: Proceedings of the NeurIPS 2021 Competitions and Demonstrations Track
Volume: 176
Pages: 190--204
Year: 2022
Series: Proceedings of Machine Learning Research
Editors: Kiela, Douwe and Ciccone, Marco and Caputo, Barbara
Publisher: PMLR
Bibtex Type: Conference Paper (inproceedings)
Event Name: NeurIPS 2021 Competitions and Demonstrations Track (NeurIPS 2021)
Event Place: Digital
State: Published
URL: https://proceedings.mlr.press/v176/bauer22a.html
Electronic Archiving: grant_archive

BibTex

@inproceedings{rrc2021,
  title = {Real Robot Challenge: A Robotics Competition in the Cloud},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the NeurIPS 2021 Competitions and Demonstrations Track},
  abstract = {Dexterous manipulation remains an open problem in robotics. To coordinate efforts of the research community towards tackling this problem, we propose a shared benchmark. We designed and built robotic platforms that are hosted at the MPI-IS and can be accessed remotely. Each platform consists of three robotic fingers that are capable of dexterous object manipulation. Users are able to control the platforms remotely by submitting code that is executed automatically, akin to a computational cluster. Using this setup, i) we host robotics competitions, where teams from anywhere in the world access our platforms to tackle challenging tasks ii) we publish the datasets collected during these competitions (consisting of hundreds of robot hours), and iii) we give researchers access to these platforms for their own projects.},
  volume = {176},
  pages = {190--204},
  series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
  editors = {Kiela, Douwe and Ciccone, Marco and Caputo, Barbara},
  publisher = {PMLR},
  year = {2022},
  slug = {rrc2021},
  author = {Bauer, Stefan and W{\"u}thrich, Manuel and Widmaier, Felix and Buchholz, Annika and Stark, Sebastian and Goyal, Anirudh and Steinbrenner, Thomas and Akpo, Joel and Joshi, Shruti and Berenz, Vincent and Agrawal, Vaibhav and Funk, Niklas and Urain, Julen and Peters, Jan and Watson, Joe and Chen, Claire and Srinivasan, Krishnan and Zhang, Junwu and Zhang, Jeffrey and Walter, Matthew and Madan, Rishabh and Yoneda, Takuma and Yarats, Denis and Allshire, Arthur and Gordon, Ethan and Bhattacharjee, Tapomayukh and Srinivasa, Siddhartha and Garg, Animesh and Maeda, Takahiro and Sikchi, Harshit and Wang, Jilong and Yao, Qingfeng and Yang, Shuyu and McCarthy, Robert and Sanchez, Francisco and Wang, Qiang and Bulens, David and McGuinness, Kevin and O'Connor, Noel and Stephen, Redmond and Sch{\"o}lkopf, Bernhard},
  url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v176/bauer22a.html}
}