CI-P: Physical robotic manipulation test facility

机器人社区在教学和训练机器人拿起和操纵物体方面有着丰富的研究和开发历史。然而，事实证明，将这项研究从结构化的实验室环境过渡到现实世界环境（如家庭、小规模工业环境和搜索和救援领域）是非常困难的。机器人操作方法的大规模、标准化测试和基准测试的发展是将机器人操作从研究实验室转移到现实世界的必要条件。把进行这些测试的重担放在每一个机器人研究人员身上，往好了说，也是低效的。清理捕获的数据以使其可供其他研究人员使用，需要数据生产者进行额外的工作——甚至需要对潜在用户进行更多的工作。所有这些都阻碍了整个社区的进步，并使人们难以接受深度学习的最新发展。该项目通过为专用的物理机器人抓取和操作测试平台基础设施奠定基础，解决了这个问题，任何人都可以远程访问和操作该领域的研究。这个试验台将提供机器人抓取和操作社区需要的几个关键组件：(i)“测试套件”，可以重复测试和控制几个变量，这些变量使机器人抓取和操作研究混淆。变量包括物体和夹持器材料特性、顺应性、物理相互作用的力/扭矩、机械臂元件和物体的质量、表面纹理、低级控制算法和高级规划技术。（ii）广泛的仪器来捕捉（几乎）物理相互作用的所有方面，如力、运动运动学和三维几何。（iii）实现机器人物理交互的模块化和可定制的人机界面。用户将能够使用低级接口直接控制机器人，例如控制单个关节运动的旋钮，或者使用封装机器人与物体交互的高级接口，例如闭合手指直到接触物体。数据收集，数据将以标准形式公开提供。这一规划活动的重点是发展必要的技术要素，以证明这种测试设施的可行性（在一个完全仪器化的空间中自动返回物体，一个完全仪器化的“门”来评估门的打开和关闭），并评估社区在这一领域的需求。

The robotics community has a rich history of research and development in teaching and training robots to pick up and manipulate objects. However, it has proven to be very difficult to transition this research from structured laboratory settings to real world settings, such as homes, small-scale industrial settings, and search and rescue domains. The development of large-scale, standardized testing and benchmarking of robotic manipulation approaches is necessary to move robotic manipulation from the research lab to the real world. Placing the burden of conducting these tests on every individual robotics researcher is inefficient, at best. Cleaning the captured data to make it available to other researchers requires additional work for the producers of the data - and even more work on potential users. All of this impedes progress for the community as a whole, and makes it difficult to bring to bear recent developments in deep learning. This project addresses this problem by setting the groundwork for a dedicated physical robotic grasping and manipulation testbed infrastructure that can be remotely accessed and operated by anyone doing research in this area. This testbed will provide several critical components that the robotics grasping and manipulation community needs: (i) "Test suites" that enable repeated testing and controlled manipulation of several variables that have confounded robotic grasping and manipulation research. Variables include object and gripper material properties, compliance, force/torque of physical interaction, mass of manipulator elements and the objects, surface texture, low-level control algorithms, and higher-level planning techniques. (ii) Extensive instrumentation to capture (nearly) all aspects of the physical interaction, such as the forces, kinematics of movement, and three-dimensional geometry. (iii) A modular and customizable human-robot interface for enabling robotic physical interaction. Users will be able to directly control the robot using low-level interfaces, such as the knobs that control the movements of individual joints, or use higher-level interfaces that encapsulate robot-object interactions, such as close the fingers until they contact the object. (iv) Data collection, where the data will be made publicly available in a standardized form. The focus of this planning activity is to develop the necessary technological elements to prove the feasibility of such a test facility (automated object return in a fully instrumented space, a fully instrumented "door" to evaluate opening and closing doors) and to evaluate the community's needs in this area.