NSF POSE: Phase II: Collaborative Open-source Manipulation Performance Assessment for Robotics Enhancement (COMPARE) Ecosystem

This project is funded by the Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) Program which seeks to harness the power of open-source development for the creation of new technology solutions to problems of national and societal importance. The Collaborative Open-source Manipulation Performance Assessment for Robotics Enhancement (COMPARE) ecosystem enables the robot manipulation community to more effectively conduct research and evaluate system performance, with the goal of enabling the quantitative comparison of approaches. By establishing a new, community-driven, open-source ecosystem for robot manipulation research and benchmarking, the field will move more rapidly towards solutions to the open problems of robot perception and grasping. This is a crucial step to push the field forward as the ineffectiveness of these capabilities limits progress in robot manipulation. Developing the COMPARE ecosystem will produce the first systematic community-driven framework to roadmap the current open-source landscape, develop mechanisms and strategies to improve the field, and establish activities that will actualize these improvements, resulting in a more effective and harmonious ecosystem for robot manipulation. The COMPARE ecosystem will be developed by establishing a community and governance structure that addresses pertinent issues in robot manipulation (e.g., modularity of software, quality control, and testing frameworks), conducting outreach to build participation, and activating the ecosystem through activities such as workshops and competitions. Given the diversity of open-source products available for robot manipulation – including perception and planning packages, datasets, benchmarking protocols, object sets, and hardware designs – the goal of the ecosystem is to create a greater cohesion and compatibility between these products. This solution will create community-driven standards for components of software pipelines that will allow increased modularity and easier implementation of these products in a way that allows for greater performance quantification. This technology will, in turn, also establish community-driven standards and procedures to encourage and implement future products that improve and evolve the state of robot manipulation research.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.