[COMPARE] Ecosystem Digest, August 2026

[COMPARE Ecosystem]

COMPARE Ecosystem Digest, August 2026

Hello open-sourcers and benchmarkers! It has been a busy month since our last ecosystem digest. We greatly appreciate everyone who has reached out to volunteer their time in helping to maintain the COMPARE Ecosystem repositories on robot-manipulation.org! We have a handful of folks getting integrated and starting to populate the repositories with new entries. For this month, we’d like to introduce two of our new contributors: Adedayo Akinade is a PhD student at Monash University in Australia, working on deformable object manipulation. He is working on adding new datasets to the COMPARE repositories. Expect more updates from Adedayo on Slack in the #datasets channel soon! Walter Bircher is a robotic hardware engineer in the USA who previously completed his PhD while working in the GRAB Lab at Yale University. He has been integrating new grasp planners, some of which are highlighted below! Walter posts in the #software channel as new assets are available. We are very grateful for both Adedayo’s and Walter’s contributions, with more coming from them and others as they get set up. Interested in helping out? Let us know! We’re also planning more technical work for others to contribute such as documenting reproducibility and integration exercises of open-source, or developing ROS 2 wrappers to modularize various open-source software components. Stay tuned! Another exciting update is the launch of the COMPARE Repository Explorers: AI-driven tools to investigate connections, similarities, and differences between the entires in the robot-manipulation.org repositories. The tool features several auto-generated visualizations and outputs based on predicted relationships between entries, and you can also query the explorer with a text prompt! We are building and integrating these throughout the site, with two available now: Grasp Planning Explorer and Motion Planning Explorer. Take them for a spin and let us know what you think! The COMPARE Repository Explorers are interactive tools for visualizing the repositories available on robot-manipulation.org and uses AI to find connections between entries and gaps in the research space Finally, as you make your plans for IROS 2026, remember that we’re running a COMPARE workshop on Sunday, September 27: Reproducing Robot Manipulation: Developing Guidelines to Improve Accessibility and Reproducibility of Open-Source. The workshop will 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.  Don’t miss our IROS 2026 workshop on Reproducing Robot Manipulation! That’s all for now! Hope anyone currently at CASE 2026 is enjoying themselves and staying cool during this scorcher of a summer.

Here’s what you may have missed and what’s coming up soon: New open-source grasp planners and pose estimation software components added, new COMPARE repository explorers available, new open-source hardware designs added, new workshops and competitions for IROS and CoRL announced, CASE is happening this week, and IROS is next month! 💬 = recent discussions in the 🤖 = recent additions to

Open-Source Software Components 💬 #software: COMPARE Repository Explorers: new AI-driven tool that can be used to investigate connections, similarities, and differences between the entires in the repositories, featuring several auto-generated visualizations and outputs based on predicted relationships between entries, and you can also query the explorer with a text prompt. These have been launched for the Grasp Planning and Motion Planning repositories. Check them out! Grasp Planning 🤖 Grasp Planners: New entries (60 total): AffordGen uses semantic affordance correspondences to transfer manipulation strategies across objects with similar functional regions. GraspGen-X uses swept-volume gripper representations to generalize grasp generation across different gripper geometries. These new entries explore ways to improve geometric generalization of grasping, approaching the problem from different directions, demonstrating meaningful improvements in zero-shot generalization, whether that means transferring to unseen objects or adapting to novel grippers without task-specific retraining.  See the Grasp Planning page for more information! Perception 🤖 Pose Estimation: New entries (11 total): GigaPose uses CNOS for detection/segmentation, ViT for feature extraction, MLPs to estimate in-plane rotation and translation, and a RANSAC framework for sampling to find the optimal pose. SAM-6D uses SAM for instance segmentation, ViT for feature matching, and performs coarse and fine matching of object pose using separate transformer models. ZS6D uses CNOS and SAM for object segmentation, ViT for feature extraction, template comparison for coarse pose estimation, and RANSAC sampling with PnP to obtain a refined pose estimate. These three additions are all zero-shot methods that do not require retraining for novel objects and require RGB images and 3D object models as inputs, which were selected for inclusion based on their performance in the BOP Challenge. See the Perception page for more information!

Open-Source Hardware Designs 🤖 Hardware Designs: New entries (65 total): FreeTacMan: handheld gripper with visuotactile sensors for data collection Good Enough Manipulation (GEM): 7-DOF arm with QDD+servo actuators, runs on LeRobot stack reBot-DevArm: 6-DOF desktop arm with optional leader, comes in 2 actuator variants - damiao & robstride ShapeForce: oft robot wrist for reading force-like signals via marker tracking from an RGB camera YUBI: handheld gripper for bimanual data collection See the Hardware Designs page for more details!

Events Workshops 🤖 Workshops: Robot manipulation related workshops for IROS 2026 and CoRL 2026 have been added! IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots & Systems (IROS) 2026 Pittsburgh, PA, USA, September 27 - October 1, 2026 Sunday, September 27 🦾 1st International Workshop on Industrial Applications of Robot Learning 🦾 Sensors and Actuators for Dexterous Manipulation: Bridging Hardware and Application Needs 🦾 5th Workshop on Mobile Manipulation and Embodied Intelligence (MOMA.v5)  🦾 Deformable Objects Manipulation: Research Foundations, Reproducibility and Real-World Challenges (DOM-R3)  🦾 Scaling vs. Structure: Rethinking Bimanual Manipulation Beyond Single-Arm Policies 🦾 Reproducing Robot Manipulation: Developing Guidelines to Improve Accessibility and Reproducibility of Open-Source  🦾 Scalable Tactile Sensing for Dexterous Manipulation Thursday, October 1 🦾 AMBRE: Adaptive Manipulation: Bridging Rigid and Soft Robotics in Underwater Environments 🦾 Contact & Learning: Is the structure of contact still useful for solving manipulation and locomotion challenges? 🦾 Geometric-Aware Representations: Structured priors, metrics, constraints, and groundings for Manipulation 🦾 Creativity in Assembly 🦾 Enhancing Dexterous Manipulation Through Haptic Feedback 🦾 Workshop on Open Robotics Software 🦾 Reproducible Benchmarking of Robotic Grasping and Manipulation: From Advanced AI to Generalized Humanoid Intelligence 🦾 Touch-to-Action: Enhancing Robot Manipulation through Tactile Perception Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2026 Austin, TX, USA, November 9 - 12, 2026 Thursday, November 12 🦾 Bringing Physics Simulation and World Models Together for Robotic Manipulation 🦾 From Human Videos to Dexterous Robot Capability: A Hands-on Tutorial 🦾 BiDexTool: Bimanual Dexterous Tool Use: From Contact-Rich Execution to Generalist Robot Intelligence 🦾 The UMI Olympics: From Handheld Devices to Real-World Policies 🦾 3rd Workshop on Dexterous Manipulation: Full-Stack Robotics on Learning and Design 🦾 Open Problems in Contact-Rich Loco-Manipulation 🦾 Beyond Binary Success: Diagnosing Fine-Grained Capabilities in Robot Manipulation See the Workshops page for more info! Competitions 🤖 Competitions: Robot manipulation related competitions for IROS 2026 have been added! IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots & Systems (IROS) 2026 Pittsburgh, PA, USA, September 27 - October 1, 2026 🦾 The Humanoid IKEA Assembly Challenge 🦾 The Robotic Origami Challenge 🦾 Forceps-based Fine Manipulation Challenge 🦾 ROCO: 2nd Robotic Collaborative Assembly Challenge See the Competitions page for more info! What’s coming up soon? IROS 2026: IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots & Systems (IROS) 202, September 27 - October 1, 2026, Pittsburgh, PA, USA 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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