Collaborative Open-source Manipulation and Perception Assets for Robotics Ecosystem (COMPARE)
Funded by the National Science Foundation, Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE), Award TI-2229577
Upcoming Workshops at ROS-I Consortium 2023, ICRA 2023, and RSS 2023
We will be hosting three upcoming workshops open-source assets for robotic manipulation towards the formation of an open-source ecosystem to support development and benchmarking:
Forum Discussion on Open-Source Robotic Manipulation and Benchmarking: Current Gaps and Future Solutions, ROS-Industrial Consortium Americas 2023 Annual Meeting, to be held in Detroit, Michigan, 5/25/23: https://rosindustrial.org/events/2023/5/ros-industrial-consortium-americas-2023-annual-meeting
Advancing Robot Manipulation Through Open-Source Ecosystems, International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2023), to be held in London, UK, 5/29/23: https://www.robot-manipulation.org/icra-2023
Forum to Develop an Open-Source Ecosystem for Robotic Manipulation, Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS 2023), to be held in Daegu, South Korea, 7/10/23: https://www.robot-manipulation.org/rss-2023
Survey on Open-Source and Benchmarking for Robotics
We are inviting you to take a survey to provide feedback on the current state of open-source assets and benchmarking resources for robotics, and future activities for improvement. Participation in this study is completely voluntary. You will not be compensated for filling out the survey. Completing the survey should take no more than 15 minutes. To be eligible for this study you must be ≥18 years of age and able to read and write in English.
If you are interested in participating, you can access the survey by clicking here!
Previous Workshops
Advancing HRI Research and Benchmarking Through Open-Source Ecosystems, Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) 2023, held in Stockholm, Sweden on March 13, 2023: https://www.robot-manipulation.org/hri-2023
Charter for Strategic Development and Ecosystem Functions
To support the development, benchmarking, and deployment of robot systems, an open-source ecosystem (OSE) is under development through the National Science Foundation (NSF) Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) program.
The OSE will facilitate the development and dissemination of the open-source assets for robotic manipulation, i.e., robot hardware, software, benchmarking practices. It will create a community-driven platform that researchers and developers can share and learn about these open-source resources, find tools to easily utilize them, collaborate on developing systematic robot experimentation methodologies, and disseminate their findings effectively. As such the OSE will address the issues facing the advancement of robot manipulation due to the lack of systematic development and benchmarking methodologies, as well as the unique challenges related to physical assets (both equipment and benchmarking tools), preventing the robotic manipulation community from effectively utilizing such resources compared to other research domains like computer vision.
The OSE will support a wide variety of open-source assets (OSAs) available or to be developed in the future for robot manipulation, including physical object sets and hardware designs, digital datasets and simulations, instructional task protocols and metrics, and functional algorithms and robotic behaviors.
Participants in the OSE will include all stakeholders of these OSAs, including developers (those who develop and maintain the OSA), contributors (those who iterate on an existing OSA), and users (those who implement OSAs in their research and development practices).
OSE structure, governance, functions, and activities will be facilitated by a distributed set of OSE participants in various roles (e.g., leadership and participatory positions), diverse in terms of terms of backgrounds, research domains, and developmental maturity, spanning industry, academia, and government entities.
Development of the OSE will be conducted transparently, with continuous input solicited from the community and outputs shared from the initial core development team, through a series of workshops, meetings, surveys, and asynchronous communication via online platforms.
It is intended that the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) best practices for their Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects be followed for all OSAs utilized within the OSE, although additional consideration will be needed for non-code-based OSAs such as those that are physical and instructional.
During Phase I of the project (2022 - 2023), the scope of the OSE shall be investigated and discovered, towards a proposal for Phase II (2024 - 2026). During Phase II, the OSE will be formally developed and established through the execution of multiple activities and functions, including, but not limited to, the following:
Establish COMPARE clearinghouse, a comprehensive and organized repository of OSAs with mechanisms to support contribution of new OSAs by developers, iterations of OSAs by contributors, and implementation of OSAs for experimentation usage.
Establish advisory committees and working groups for reviewing OSA development, implementation, and benchmarking with OSE participants, with groups established for particular applications (e.g., bimanual manipulation, human-robot handovers, etc.).
Establish collaborative test facilities for conducting interlaboratory experiments and round robin testing of OSAs and robotic solutions that utilize OSAs to evaluate their robustness and demonstrate replicable performance.
Propose new research conference tracks and journals specific to the OSE topics of interest, including open-source benchmarking and dataset generation.
Provide roadmaps and frameworks for OSA development maturity with supporting templates and processes for effectively reaching each stage.
Provide webinars, tutorials, and instructions for OSE participation as a developer, contributor, and user, for usage of the previously described assets and activities.
Define OSE-specific standards for OSA structure, deployment, and interoperability, for potential support by standards development organizations (SDOs) like IEEE or ASTM.
Provision OSE participants with a common set of facilities, including robotic equipment, tools, hardware OSAs, software OSAs, and access to remotely accessible supporting infrastructure, as needed for participating organizations, with eligibility of such provisions to be based on a set of established criteria.
Coordinate large-scale events across the OSE such as distributed hackathons, grand challenges, and competitions to ignite targeted, active development of OSAs, robotic capabilities, and/or benchmarking of robot systems.
Identify strategies for a sustainable OSE, i.e. establishing monetary (company or government partnerships, membership mechanisms) and human resources (governance structure) for long-term operation.
Principal Investigators
Holly Yanco
University of Massachusetts Lowell
Adam Norton
University of Massachusetts Lowell
Berk Calli
Worcester Polytechnic University
Aaron Dollar
Yale University
Contact
If you are interested in contributing to the development of the COMPARE open-source ecosystem or have any questions or comments, please e-mail Adam Norton at adam_norton@uml.edu