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

Timeline

The special issue will follow the following timeline:

Guest Editors

Berk Calli

RAL SI Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Challenges and Progress

Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Worcester (MA), USA

E: bcalli@wpi.edu

Joe Falco

RAL SI Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Challenges and Progress

NIST
Maryland, USA

E: falco@nist.gov

Minas Liarokapis

RAL SI Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Challenges and Progress

University of Auckland
Auckland, New Zealand

E: minas.liarokapis@auckland.ac.nz

Maximo Roa

RAL SI Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Challenges and Progress

DLR - German Aerospace Center
Weßling, Germany

E: Maximo.Roa@dlr.de

Yu Sun

RAL SI Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Challenges and Progress

University of South Florida
Tampa (FL), USA

E: yusun@usf.edu

Rong Xiong

RAL SI Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Challenges and Progress

Zhejiang University
Hangzhou, China

E: rxiong@zju.edu.cn