CFP: Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Challenges and Progress

Motivation

Over the last decade there has been a significant increase of research activities focusing on robotic grasping and dexterous manipulation in dynamic and unstructured environments. The special issue “Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Challenges and Progress” of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters aims to summarize the state of the art and recent progress that has been achieved by the teams participating in the grasping and manipulation competitions of the IEEE-RAS Technical Committee on Robotic Hands, Grasping and Manipulation.

The desired outcome of this special issue will be to highlight the challenges that the researchers face, to share the knowledge and the open-source tools that have been created for these competitions, and to focus on high impact applications of the conducted research. This special issue will encourage submission of joint works of different research groups that have been competing against each other in logistics, services robotics, and manufacturing competitions, using different robotic grasping and dexterous manipulation methods and technologies. We believe that the collection of papers would also form a guideline for new participants and encourage participation to similar competitions in the future.

Topics

Topics of interest for this special issue include and are not limited to:

New modelling, design, and control methods for robotic grippers and hands
New planning methods for robotic grasping and dexterous manipulation
New perception methods for grasping and dexterous manipulation tasks in unstructured environments
New benchmarks and evaluation methods that focus on robotic grasping and manipulation
Machine learning methods and schemes that focus on robotic grasping and dexterous manipulation tasks
Skill transfer between humans and robots for robust grasping and dexterous, within-hand manipulation
Systems and architectures of robotics systems that are successful in grasping and manipulation competition

Submissions to the special issue should be related to a robotic grasping and manipulation competition or challenge. The authors should specify in the cover note how the paper is related to a competition or challenge. A relationship justification could be:

techniques that can be used to solve a problem or a task in a competition or challenge, and they are evaluated using a similar setup as the one in a competition or challenge, or
new benchmarks that can evaluate research progress, but have not been covered by any competitions or challenges.

Timeline

The special issue will follow the following timeline:

15 March 2021			Papercept open for submission
1 April 2021			Submission deadline
1 July 2021			Authors receive RA-L reviews and recommendation
15 July 2021			Authors of accepted MS submit final RA-L version
31 July 2021			Authors of R&R MS resubmit revised MS
1 September 2021			Authors receive final RA-L decision
15 September 2021			Authors submit final RA-L files
20 September 2021			Camera ready version appears in RA-L on Xplore
30 September 2021			Final Publication