[COMPARE] Ecosystem Digest, May 11, 2026

[COMPARE Ecosystem]

COMPARE Ecosystem Digest, May 11, 2026

COMPARErs, assemble! The robot manipulation research field is going to be quite busy over the next month or so, with international conferences like ERAS (Croatia), ICRA (Austria), and CVPR (USA) right around the corner, followed by regional symposiums like NEMS (New England, USA), international competitions like RoboCup (South Korea), and another batch of international conferences like RSS (Australia) and UR (Japan) after that! And with these events we expect a whole slew of new open-source contributions and benchmarking assets to be made available and ready for integration into robot-manipulation.org! Members of the core COMPARE Ecosystem project team will be participating in several of these events, including: 🤖 ERAS: Keynote presentation on The COMPARE Ecosystem: Improving Reproducibility and Integration of Open-Source for Robot Grasping and Manipulation 🤖 ICRA: The 11th Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Competition (RGMC) with 3 tracks: Human-to-Robot Handover, Picking from Clutter, and Cloud Robotics 🤖NEMS: This year’s submissions that include contributions to open-source and benchmarking will be highlighted during a workshop on Integration, Reproducibility, and Benchmarking of Robot Manipulation If you see us there, be sure to grab a robot-manipulation.org sticker! We’ll be on the lookout for stickers on your laptops, which is always a fun hunt. More to come, so stay tuned!

Here’s what you may have missed and what’s coming up soon: A new tool for running simulation benchmarks from Tektonian has been released, new grasp planners, a new segmentation repository, new open-source end-effector designs, and new object datasets have been added to robot-manipulation.org, and ERAS, ICRA, and CVPR are coming up!  💬 = recent discussions in the 🤖 = recent additions to

Open-Source Software Components 💬 #software: Tektonian has been working on a small tool to run simulation benchmarks without local setup called Simulac. The idea is to remove the usual environment/config overhead and just focus on evaluation: Benchmarks run via API (no simulator install) Full evaluation can be done in a few minutes (e.g., RoboCasa-scale) Currently supporting ~8 benchmarks One example we recently added is evaluating a VLA model (OpenPI) on RoboCasa — basically load → run → get results, no missing setup steps. [tektonian.com] [benchmarks] [documentation] [Slack thread] Grasp Planning 🤖 Grasp Planners: 2 new entries (58 total): MISCGrasp: MISCGrasp is a volumetric grasping method that integrates multi-scale feature extraction with contrastive feature enhancement for self-adaptive grasping. [supervised learning, two-finger, depth image input, 7-DoF grasp pose output] QD-Grasp: A framework leveraging Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms to generate repertoires of diverse and high-performing grasping trajectories and 6-DoF grasp poses in robotics. [optimization, several types of end-effectors, 3D object model mesh input, 6-DoF grasp pose output] Perception 🤖 Segmentation: A repository containing Segmentation models and approaches has been released! Including classical algorithmic approaches, model architectures which are reasonable to train locally, and large foundational models which don't require retraining. Each model is catalogued according to its required inputs, domain, application type, and links to papers and repositories. With 13 entries so far, we will continue adding more models, including 3D segmentation approaches in the near future.

Open-Source Hardware Designs 🤖 Hardware Designs: 3 new entries (56 total): CRAFT Hand: CRAFT Hand is a tendon-driven anthropomorphic hand with hybrid hard-soft compliance. It uses soft materials at joints and rigid materials for the links. The joints are rolling-contact surfaces to keep flexion on repeatable motion paths. The full design costs under $600 and uses 15 actuators. Magpie Gripper: Magpie gripper is a low-cost gripper with individually actuated 4-bar linkages. The fingers have torque sensing at the actuators via current control, and the gripper has an RGB-D camera in the palm.  Yeah Hand: Yeah Hand (formerly Rebelia Hand) is an open source tendon-driven anthropomorphic robotic hand with 15 DOF and uses 5 Servomotors. The servo motors have torque feedback and can apply 25 Kg*cm per finger.

Datasets 🤖 Object Datasets: 2 new entries (22 total): ROBI: Reflective Objects in Bins Dataset: ROBI is a public, real-world multi-view dataset for evaluating robotic perception tasks (6D object pose estimation, multi-view depth fusion, depth completion) on highly reflective, texture-less industrial parts in bin-picking scenarios. Includes ~8K images across 63 bin-picking scenes, annotated with accurate 6D object poses and visibility scores. T-ROBI: Transparent Reflective Objects in Bins Dataset: T-ROBI is a multi-view dataset that targets transparent and reflective industrial objects. It includes 2 industrial objects exhibiting varying levels of transparency and reflectivity and 12 complex bin-picking scenes, where objects are randomly stacked, captured from 55 distinct viewpoints using an EPSON C4L 6-axis robot which includes annotations of ground truth poses for each object in all scenes as well as high-fidelity depth maps captured with a high-end Ensenso camera. A large-scale synthetic dataset is also included to facilitate network training.

Events What’s coming up soon? ERAS 2026: IEEE RAS International Conference on Engineering Reliable Autonomous Systems (ERAS) 2026, May 28-29, 2026, Zagreb, Croatia Registration is open for ERAS 2026! Early bird deadline is May 15, 2026: https://web.cvent.com/event/ea5d3378-445c-4603-8e86-d6a542703786/  Watch for our keynote during the conference: The COMPARE Ecosystem: Improving Reproducibility and Integration of Open-Source for Robot Grasping and Manipulation ICRA 2026: IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA) 2026, June 1-5, 2026, Vienna, Austria 13 workshops and tutorials related to robot manipulation:  🤖 SimR: Simulation in Robotics 🤖 8th International Workshop on Robotics Software Engineering (RoSE26) 🤖 Act to Sense to Act Better: 1st Workshop on Learning and Representations for Active Perception in Manipulation 🤖 Dexterity with Multifingered Hands: Hardware, Sensing, and Skills 🤖 Open Challenges for Rigorous Robot Perception 🤖 Hands-on Tutorial: 3D tactile sensor integration in robotic fingers for smart manipulation 🤖 20 Years of Workshops on Benchmarking and Reproducibility: Part I Reproducibility 🤖 Beyond Teleoperation: Learning from Diverse Human and Simulation Data 🤖 Emerging paradigms for robotic manipulation: the reality of extreme conditions 🤖 From Data to Decisions: VLA Pipelines for Real Robots 🤖 Human-Inspired Principles for Robotic Dexterous Manipulation: What Are We Missing? 🤖 RoboTac 2026: Embodied Tactile Intelligence in Predictive Perception, Learning, & Control in Grasp & Manipulation: Emerging the Role of Embodiment and Visuo-Tactile-LLM Foundation Models 🤖 Workshop on Manipulation Robustness: Towards Human-Level Robustness under Real-World Challenges 8 competitions involving robot manipulation: 🤖 AgiBot World Challenge 2026 🤖 AI for Robotic Surgery 🤖 LeHome Challenge 2026: Challenge on Garment Manipulation Skill Learning in Household Scenarios 🤖 REAL-I: The 1st Real-World Embodied AI Learning Challenge 🤖 RGMC 2026: Human-to-Robot Handover Track 🤖 RGMC 2026: Picking from Clutter Track 🤖 RGMC 2026: Cloud Robotics Track 🤖 What Bimanuals Can Do (WBCD) CVPR 2026: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026, June 3-7, 2026, Denver, Colorado, USA 7 workshops related to robot manipulation: 🤖 The 2nd 3D-LLM/VLA Workshop: Bridging Language, Vision and Action in 3D Environments 🤖 Bridging Vision, Language, and Action: What's Missing in Actionable Visual Perception for Robotics 🤖 OpenSUN3D: 6th Workshop on Open-World 3D Scene Understanding with Foundation Models 🤖 Embodied Reasoning in Action: Workshop and Challenge on Embodied Reasoning for Robotic Manipulation 🤖 ScaleBot: The First Workshop on Scalable Robot Learning Systems 🤖 Unified Robotic Vision with Cross-Modal Sensing and Alignment 🤖 6th Workshop on 3D Scene Understanding for Vision, Graphics, and Robotics Subscribe to the Robot Manipulation Events Google Calendar to stay in the loop!

🤖 Have suggestions for open-source products or benchmarking assets that should be added? Submit them here! https://forms.gle/LHrtmDpm82X4qrDk6 🤖 Have suggestions for events we should add? Use this form to let us know! https://forms.gle/PfiSRjcuQnavbPNS9

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Adam Norton, Community Facilitator, COMPARE Ecosystem

Improving Open-Source and Benchmarking for Robot Manipulation

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