[COMPARE] Ecosystem Digest, June 29 - July 12, 2025

[COMPARE Ecosystem]

COMPARE Ecosystem Digest, June 29 - July 12, 2025

Here’s what you may have missed last week and what’s coming up soon!

🤖 We're building a new repository for Motion Planning Datasets!

• It’s become apparent we should start organizing a repo of datasets to use for benchmarking motion planning. For example, MotionBenchMaker includes 40 different datasets for manipulation. Have suggestions on datasets or tools we should include? Use this Google Form to let us know! https://forms.gle/LHrtmDpm82X4qrDk6
  

🤖 Recent discussions in the COMPARE Slack!

• #benchmarking_datasets: Looking for insight regarding synthetic datasets for training: [1] what specific robotics problems suffer from a lack of good vision training data? [2] what new training datasets do you think would be most useful to the robotics community in general? [3] what new training datasets would be useful for your specific research? [link]
  
  

🤖 Latest additions to robot-manipulation.org:

• Software Components: Learning Environments

• AgiBot World: A full-stack large-scale robot learning platform curated for advancing bimanual manipulation in scalable and intelligent embodied systems. It is accompanied by foundation models, benchmarks, and an ecosystem to democratize access to high-quality robot data for the academic community and the industry, paving the path towards the "ImageNet Moment" for Embodied AI.
  
  

• RoboManipBaselines: Software that integrates various imitation learning methods and benchmark task environments to provide baselines for robot manipulation.
  
  

• Many more additions are on their way as we still digest the material presented at ICRA, CVPR, and RSS. Come across any new open-source products or benchmarking assets that should be added? Use this Google Form to let us know! https://forms.gle/LHrtmDpm82X4qrDk6
  
  

• Events

• Workshops

• RObotic MAnipulation of Deformable Objects (ROMADO 2025): October 20, 2025 at IROS 2025 in Hangzhou, China
  From folding clothes to manipulating food or surgical tissues, many objects robots need to interact with are deformable. The ROMADO 2025 workshop will bring together leading researchers to address challenges in modeling, perceiving, and manipulating deformable objects in the real world. The focus is on enabling robots to handle non-rigid materials through an interplay of perception, learning, and control, pushing toward intelligent robotic assistance in everyday and assistive settings.
  
  

• Contact and Impact-Aware Manipulation (CIM25): October 24, 2025 at IROS 2025 in Hangzhou, China
  This workshop marks the first gathering of experts and researchers to discuss the topic of Contact and Impact-aware Manipulation (CIM). The proposed half-day event will explore recent advancements in robotic manipulation strategies in contact-rich environments and review the outcomes of the special issue on impact-aware robotics published in the IEEE Transactions on Robotics. Furthermore, the workshop will feature presentations on advanced tactile sensors and their application in contact-aware operations on humanoid robots, showcased by the leading robotics company. By bringing together academic researchers and industrial engineers under one roof, this workshop promotes deeper integration between haptic perception and robotic manipulation and further fosters innovative research for CIM.
  
  

• Competitions

•  AgiBot World Challenge: October 19, 2025 at IROS 2025 in Hangzhou, China
  Most existing robot learning benchmarks fall short when it comes to addressing real-world challenges, particularly those arising from low-quality data and limited sensing capabilities. These benchmarks often focus on short-horizon tasks within controlled environments. In contrast, the AgiBot World is the first large-scale multi-agents robotic dataset designed to advance multi-purpose humanoid robots. In this challenge, participants are required to work with data from the real-world domain or collected interactively in a simulator. In both scenarios, participants must demonstrate an accurate understanding of their surroundings and make informed decisions based on the given context.
  
  

• Have suggestions for events we should add? Use this Google Form to let us know! https://forms.gle/PfiSRjcuQnavbPNS9

🤖 What's coming up soon?

• International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER) 2025 is this week! Santa Fe, NM, USA, July 6 - 10, 2025
  Sessions on perception, grasping, and planning will be held on Tuesday July 8, 2025. Accepted papers have been posted, linked on the ISER 2025 Program page!
  

• World Robot Summit (WRS) 2025: Future Convenience Store Challenge (FCSC) is next week! Osaka, Japan, July 13 - 19, 2025
  
  

• RoboCup 2025: Autonomous Robot Manipulation (ARM) Challenge starts next week! Salvador, Brazil, July 15 - 21, 2025
  
  

• Subscribe to the Robot Manipulation Events Google Calendar to stay in the loop!

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Adam Norton, Community Facilitator, COMPARE Ecosystem

Improving Open-Source and Benchmarking for Robot Manipulation

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