[COMPARE] Ecosystem Digest, January 12, 2026

[COMPARE Ecosystem]

COMPARE Ecosystem Digest, January 12, 2026

Happy new year, COMPARErs! We are entering 2026 with energy and drive, and we hope you are, too! After taking a holiday break, we kicked off the start of the year by participating in several UK-focused events to update the community on our latest efforts towards developing standards and guidelines for grasping and manipulation pipelines (see below), continue to build out the COMPARE Ecosystem network, and gather additional resources to add to the repositories on robot-manipulation.org, so expect more updates soon!  Community Facilitator Adam Norton presenting at the 7th UK Robot Manipulation Workshop in Edinburgh, UK Download the presentation here: Towards Developing Standards and Guidelines for Robot Grasping and Manipulation Pipelines in the COMPARE Ecosystem (PDF) In the meantime, let’s start ironing out our 2026 conference schedule! The Robot Manipulation Events Google calendar has been updated with a slate of upcoming 2026 conferences including HRI, ERF, ERAS, ICRA, RSS, and IROS, with more to come. As workshops and competitions are announced for these and other conferences, they will be announced here and added to their respective pages under Events.  We’re looking forward to another year of opening the source and marking the bench, but we can only do it together! Submit open-source products and benchmarking assets, upcoming events, and take advantage of the COMPARE Slack to engage with robot manipulation researchers, contributing to the development and growth of the COMPARE Ecosystem. 🤖

Here’s what you may have missed and what’s coming up soon: Many new open-source products and benchmarking assets (especially around tactile sensing) are being added to robot-manipulation.org, new job opportunities have been posted, and several conferences have been added to the calendar! 💬 = recent discussions in the 🤖 = recent additions to

Open-Source Software Components 💬 #software: RoTO: Robot Tactile Olympiad: An open-source Reinforcement Learning benchmark environment designed to standardise and promote future research in tactile-based manipulation [GitHub]  💬 #software: SimTac: A Physics-Based Simulator for Vision-Based Tactile Sensing with Biomorphic Structures [arXiv]

Open-Source Hardware Designs 💬 #hardware: The TacTip sensor family has many iterations of open-source hardware designs for tactile sensing available [website] [Slack thread] 💬 #hardware: Tactile SoftHand-A: An open-source design for a hand that can utilize the TacTip sensors [GitHub]

Events 💬 #events: The 11th Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Competition will be held at IEEE/ RAS International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2026 in Vienna, Austria with four competition tracks: Picking in Clutter, Human-to-Robot Handover, Mobile Manipulation, and Cloud Robotics [website] [Slack thread] What’s coming up this year? HRI 2026: ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) 2026, March 16-19, 2026, Edinburgh, UK ERF 2026: European Robotics Forum (ERF) 2026, March 23-27, 2026, Stavanger, Norway ERAS 2026: IEEE RAS International Conference on Engineering Reliable Autonomous Systems (ERAS) 2026, May 28-29, 2026, Zagreb, Croatia ICRA 2026: IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA) 2026, June 1-5, 2026, Vienna, Austria RoboCup 2026, June 30 - July 6, 2026, Incheon, South Korea RSS 2026: Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2026, July 13-17, 2026, Sydney, Australia IROS 2026: IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots & Systems (IROS) 2026, September 27 - October 1, 2026, Pittsburgh, PA, USA Subscribe to the Robot Manipulation Events Google Calendar to stay in the loop!

Job Postings 💬 #job-postings: Amazon Robotics in Berlin is hiring! Check out this posting for a Postdoctoral Researcher [link] 💬 #job-postings: PickNik has opened up a couple new roles on their product and customer delivery teams [link]

🤖 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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