[COMPARE] Ecosystem Digest, June 9, 2026
COMPARE Ecosystem
COMPARE Ecosystem Digest, June 9, 2026 |
Hello COMPARErs! It has been a busy few weeks with ERAS, ICRA, and CVPR all taking place since the last ecosystem digest. We are working our way through the various contributions to open-source and benchmarking in robot manipulation that we came across at these conferences so you can expect a lot of updates to the robot-manipulation.org repositories this month. But, we are only a small core team, so please be sure to submit anything useful you came across either using our submission form (click here!) or make a post in the COMPARE Slack!
There were 8 competitions at ICRA 2026 involving robot manipulation. Next up we have the regional New England Manipulation Symposium (NEMS) taking place in one week in Amherst, MA, USA! We are organizing this year’s NEMS which will include a COMPARE workshop on day 2. Then as we enter July there are three international events: RoboCup in Incheon, Korea, RSS in Sydney, Australia, and UR in Osaka, Japan. It’s quite a busy summer!
NEMS 2026 takes place at UMass Amherst June 16-17, 2026. Looking out even further into October we have IROS in Pittsburgh, PA, USA, and we’re happy to report that a COMPARE workshop has been accepted to the conference! A half-day workshop, “Reproducing Robot Manipulation: Developing Guidelines to Improve Accessibility and Reproducibility of Open-Source,” will be held to bring together developers and users of open-source software/code for robot manipulation and hold in-depth discussions on recommendations and best practices to improve the accessibility, integration, modularity, and reproducibility of open-source, split into two topics: (1) Developing and Sharing Components, and (2) Integrating Components Together. For each topic, there will be 1-2 invited talks from users and developers of open-source, followed by guided breakout discussions facilitated by workshop organizers, then group reporting and review, ending with synthesizing the results into a draft set of guidelines and next steps.
Lastly, we recently organized a “Dexterous Manipulation Roundtable,” bringing together leaders in the robot dexterity space to exchange ideas and discuss current limitations and recommendations for improvement in the ecosystem, capturing participants’ inputs on benchmarking, reproducibility, and standards, interrelated concepts that are integral to the advancement of robotics. Aaron Prather (ASTM International) wrote an excellent article on his Six Degrees of Robotics Substack covering the meeting, describing this relationship as a three-legged stool: “Remove any leg, and the entire structure falls over.”
Participants of the “Dexterous Manipulation Roundtable” meeting at ICRA 2026. |
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