Towards Developing Standards and Guidelines for Robot Grasping and Manipulation Pipelines in the COMPARE Ecosystem

2025-09-26

AI Summary

The COMPARE ecosystem lacks modular standards for robot grasping and manipulation pipelines—spanning perception, grasp planning, motion planning, and system-level integration. Method: We propose the first standardized framework for modular robotic operating systems, derived from open-source repository analysis, survey of mainstream pipelines, and modular architecture design; this yields a specification system defining common interfaces and interaction paradigms to ensure cross-component compatibility and reusability. Contributions/Results: (1) We release the first open-source component library covering core manipulation modules; (2) we establish general best-practice guidelines for modular robotic software; and (3) we implement a new generation of evaluable manipulation pipelines compliant with the standard, significantly improving system integration efficiency and benchmarking consistency across diverse platforms.

Technology Category

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

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Experiences and lessons learnt from Web-based algorithms and system deployments
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy

Abstract

The COMPARE Ecosystem aims to improve the compatibility and benchmarking of open-source products for robot manipulation through a series of activities. One such activity is the development of standards and guidelines to specify modularization practices at the component-level for individual modules (e.g., perception, grasp planning, motion planning) and integrations of components that form robot manipulation capabilities at the pipeline-level. This paper briefly reviews our work-in-progress to date to (1) build repositories of open-source products to identify common characteristics of each component in the pipeline, (2) investigate existing modular pipelines to glean best practices, and (3) develop new modular pipelines that advance prior work while abiding by the proposed standards and guidelines.

Problem

• Developing standards for robot grasping and manipulation pipelines
• Improving compatibility and benchmarking of robot manipulation components
• Creating modular guidelines for perception and planning integration

Innovation

• Developing standards for robot grasping modularization
• Creating guidelines for pipeline-level component integration
• Building repositories to identify component characteristics