Real Robot Challenge: A Robotics Competition in the Cloud
This provides a standardized platform for the robotics research community to advance dexterous manipulation, though it is incremental as it builds on existing competition and remote access concepts.
The authors tackled the open problem of dexterous manipulation in robotics by proposing a shared benchmark, designing and building remote-accessible robotic platforms with three fingers for manipulation, and hosting competitions where teams worldwide submit code to control these platforms, resulting in the publication of datasets from hundreds of robot hours.
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.