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 MPI for Intelligent Systems 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.
@article{arxiv.2109.10957,
title = {Real Robot Challenge: A Robotics Competition in the Cloud},
author = {Stefan Bauer and Felix Widmaier and Manuel Wüthrich and Annika Buchholz and Sebastian Stark and Anirudh Goyal and Thomas Steinbrenner and Joel Akpo and Shruti Joshi and Vincent Berenz and Vaibhav Agrawal and Niklas Funk and Julen Urain De Jesus and Jan Peters and Joe Watson and Claire Chen and Krishnan Srinivasan and Junwu Zhang and Jeffrey Zhang and Matthew R. Walter and Rishabh Madan and Charles Schaff and Takahiro Maeda and Takuma Yoneda and Denis Yarats and Arthur Allshire and Ethan K. Gordon and Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee and Siddhartha S. Srinivasa and Animesh Garg and Harshit Sikchi and Jilong Wang and Qingfeng Yao and Shuyu Yang and Robert McCarthy and Francisco Roldan Sanchez and Qiang Wang and David Cordova Bulens and Kevin McGuinness and Noel O'Connor and Stephen J. Redmond and Bernhard Schölkopf},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.10957},
year = {2022}
}