[COMPARE] Ecosystem Digest, July 20 - August 2, 2025

[COMPARE Ecosystem]

COMPARE Ecosystem Digest, July 20 - August 2, 2025

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

🤖 Recent discussions in the COMPARE Slack:

• #software_simulation: What is your simulator of choice? We are trying to identify the most commonly used / useful simulation environments with a Slack poll, especially regarding how accurately it simulates contact physics [link]

• #benchmarking_objects-artifacts: Toward YCB 2.0: a worldwide community-based dataset for robotics: new analyses of survey results regarding YCB usage and desired objects and features for benchmarking [link]
• Take a look at the analysis results here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18pHcUIGi0Q99Ih_cpnU5YlSsF75wR9cd9eJvTGyFVs8/

• Not part of the COMPARE Slack, but want to contribute to these discussions? Please email compare....@gmail.com with your thoughts! 

🤖 Latest additions to robot-manipulation.org:

• Software Components

• Simulation:

• Simulators:
• MuJoCo Warp (MJWwarp): A GPU-optimized version of the MuJoCo physics simulator, designed for NVIDIA hardware. MJWarp uses NVIDIA Warp to circumvent many of the sharp bits in MuJoCo MJX.

• Models and Descriptions: New repository linking to collections of robot models and descriptions and conversion tools
• Awesome Robot Descriptions: A curated list of awesome robot descriptions in URDF, Xacro or MJCF formats.
• Awesome URDF: A curated list of Unified Robot Description Format (URDF) libraries, tools and resources.
• MJCF2USD: A user-friendly tool that enables seamless conversion of MuJoCo simulation files to USD format, making it easy to integrate MuJoCo models into Omniverse workflows and other USD-compatible applications.
• MuJoCo Menagerie: A collection of high-quality models for the MuJoCo physics engine, curated by Google DeepMind. The goal of this collection is to provide the community with a curated library of well-designed models that work well right out of the gate.
• robot_descriptions.py: Import open source robot descriptions as Python modules.

• Benchmarking Assets

• Datasets: New page that collects datasets from across the COMPARE Ecosystem, including datasets of grasps, objects, and manipulation tasks

• Manipulation Datasets: New repository that collects datasets of various manipulation tasks including assembly and home/service robotics applications
• DROID (Distributed Robot Interaction Dataset): A diverse robot manipulation dataset with 76k demonstration trajectories or 350h of interaction data, collected across 564 scenes and 86 tasks by 50 data collectors in North America, Asia, and Europe. 
• Functional Manipulation Benchmark (FMB): Consists of objects in diverse appearance and geometry that requires multi-stage and multi-modal fine motor skills to successfully assemble the pegs onto a unfixed board in a randomized scene. 22,550 trajectories are collected across two different tasks on a Franka Panda arm from 2 global views and 2 wrist views.
• FurnitureBench: A real-world furniture assembly benchmark, which aims at providing a reproducible and easy-to-use platform for long-horizon complex robotic manipulation.
• Open X-Embodiment: Datasets in standardized data formats and models to make it possible to explore this possibility in the context of robotic manipulation, alongside experimental results that provide an example of effective X-robot policies. We assemble a dataset from 22 different robots collected through a collaboration between 21 institutions, demonstrating 527 skills (160,266 tasks). 
• REASSEMBLE (Robotic assEmbly disASSEMBLy datasEt): A new dataset designed specifically for contact-rich manipulation tasks, built around the NIST Assembly Task Board 1 benchmark, includes four actions (pick, insert, remove, and place) involving 17 objects. The dataset contains 4,551 demonstrations, of which 4,035 were successful, spanning a total of 781 minutes.
• RH20T: A dataset comprising over 110,000 contact-rich robot manipulation sequences across diverse skills, contexts, robots, and camera viewpoints, all collected in the real world. Each sequence in the dataset includes visual, force, audio, and action information, along with a corresponding human demonstration video. 

• Objects and Artifacts:

• Physical Objects and Artifacts:
• FurnitureBench: The furniture models are designed inspired by IKEA furniture and modified to enable a single robotic arm to carry out the assembly. To make the real-robot environment easy to reproduce, we opt for widely used products across the world (e.g., Franka Panda, Intel RealSense cameras, IKEA table) and 3D-printing objects.

• Object Datasets:
• 2BY2 Dataset: A large-scale annotated dataset for daily pairwise objects assembly, covering 18 fine-grained tasks that reflect real-life scenarios, such as plugging into sockets, arranging flowers in vases, and inserting bread into toasters, including 1,034 instances and 517 pairwise objects with pose and symmetry annotations.

• Have suggestions for open-source products or benchmarking assets that should be added? Submit them here: https://forms.gle/LHrtmDpm82X4qrDk6 

• Events: 

• Workshops: New workshops for the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2025 in Hangzhou, China, October 19 - 25, 2025!
  
  
• RObotic MAnipulation of Deformable Objects (ROMADO 2025)
• Benchmarking in Soft Robotics Towards Community-driven Standards for Simulations, Sensing, and Control
• Perception and Planning for Mobile Manipulation in Changing Environments
• Frontiers in Dynamic, Intelligent, and Adaptive Multi-Arm Manipulation
• Benchmarking via Competitions in Robotic Grasping and Manipulation – 2nd Edition
• Tactile Sensing Toward Robot Dexterity and Intelligence
• Robotic Fine Manipulation: Integrating Tactile, Visual, and Intelligent Control
• Robot Learning From Human Teleoperation: Prospects and Challenges
• 4th Workshop on Mobile Manipulation and Embodied Intelligence (MOMA.v4): Towards Next-Gen Mobile Manipulation with Modularity, Reconfiguration, and Generalisation
• Bimanual Manipulation: Advancing Human-Humanoid Interaction and Collaboration
• Beyond R,r,reply- Articles: Towards Evidence Based Measurable Robotics Research
• Contact and Impact-Aware Manipulation (CIM25)

• Are we missing any upcoming events? Use this Google Form to let us know! https://forms.gle/PfiSRjcuQnavbPNS9

🤖 What's coming up soon?

• CASE 2025, TAROS 2025, and IHO25 are next month!

• IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE) 2025, August 17 - 21, 2025 in Los Angeles, CA, USA
  
  

• Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems (TAROS) 2025, August 20 - 22, 2025 in York, UK
  TAROS will feature a special Session organized by ARIA publishing a new strategy on Modularity and Interoperability for Robotics and Autonomous Systems! More info here.
  
  

• International Humanoid Olympiad 2025 (IHO25), August 29 - September 2, 2025 in Olympia, Greece
  
  

• 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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