CI-P: Physical robotic manipulation test facility

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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.