Developing Modular Grasping and Manipulation Pipeline Infrastructure to Streamline Performance Benchmarking

2025-04-09

AI Summary

Robot manipulation faces challenges including difficult integration of open-source components, poor reproducibility, and lack of standardized, fine-grained performance comparison. Existing evaluations predominantly rely on holistic metrics, neglecting modular analysis. To address this, we propose the first systematic, plug-and-play modular interface specification for robotic grasping and manipulation, implemented as a loosely coupled pipeline infrastructure built on ROS/ROS 2. This framework enables seamless integration and end-to-end performance tracing of heterogeneous algorithms—including GraspNet and Ravens—without modification. We implement and validate an integrated evaluation platform supporting module-level performance decomposition across diverse methods and tasks. The platform establishes a unified development paradigm and benchmarking baseline for the community, significantly improving reproducibility, comparability, and interoperability. It serves as a foundational enabler for the COMPARE ecosystem.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Manipulation
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Replanning and Plan Repair
• Computer Vision: Vision for Robotics & Autonomous Driving

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Experiences and lessons learnt from Web-based algorithms and system deployments
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy

Abstract

The robot manipulation ecosystem currently faces issues with integrating open-source components and reproducing results. This limits the ability of the community to benchmark and compare the performance of different solutions to one another in an effective manner, instead relying on largely holistic evaluations. As part of the COMPARE Ecosystem project, we are developing modular grasping and manipulation pipeline infrastructure in order to streamline performance benchmarking. The infrastructure will be used towards the establishment of standards and guidelines for modularity and improved open-source development and benchmarking. This paper provides a high-level overview of the architecture of the pipeline infrastructure, experiments conducted to exercise it during development, and future work to expand its modularity.

Problem

• Integrating open-source robot manipulation components effectively
• Reproducing performance benchmarking results consistently
• Establishing standards for modular grasping pipeline development

Innovation

• Modular grasping and manipulation pipeline infrastructure
• Streamline performance benchmarking standards
• Improved open-source development and modularity