What is a Digital Robot Judge (DR.J)? - ICRA'24 Paper Highlight
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Today, Peter So, a MIRMI research associate, will be presenting his and colleagues' work at ICRA 2024 in Yokohama, Japan. We ask him three questions about his research into an electronic 'taskboard' to measure robots manipulative skills across a range of activities.
The 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) is being held from May 13th to 17th in Yokohama, Japan, and brings together robotics researchers, students and industrial partners from around the world to discuss the latest innovations and breakthroughs in robotics, and their ability to address global challenges.
Included among the papers accepted for presentation is one by MIRMI research associate, Peter So, and colleagues. We asked him about the paper, "Digital Robot Judge (DR.J): Building a Task-Centric Performance Database of Real-World Manipulation with Electronic Task Boards", which he will be presenting in Yokohama today:
What did you find out?
Peter So: We measured the performance gap between humans and robots for various manipulation skills across several top robotics labs in the world. We examined skills including localizing and pressing buttons, inserting and turning keys, reading and setting dials, opening and extracting batteries from electronic devices, and probing electrical circuits and wrapping up probing cables. We found that while robots still lag behind in overall skill dexterity and performance across the range of tasks they can greatly exceed human speed in specialized tasks with engineered tools.
What challenges did you face during your research?
Peter So: Collecting real-world robot experimental data is difficult, getting many disparate research labs to work on the exact same problem is even harder. That is why we organized a competition in partnership with the automatica trade show, Messe Muenchen through the Bavarian High-Tech Agenda munich_i to create a platform for roboticists around the world to demonstrate their capabilities. The competition was initially intended to take place in person, however due to the travel restrictions from COVID-19, we pivoted and designed an internet-of-things task board and conducted a remote competition which we believe widened the number and diversity of participants. This change also resulted in the creation of an ongoing community of roboticists who can stay connected through the web platform and continue to improve their robot's skills against our benchmark even after the competition.
Where do you see practical applications?
Peter So: The robot manipulation skills developed on the task board are tailored to meet pressing industry needs. The task boards are designed with input from MIRMI's industry partners to capture the gaps in rolling out automation projects. Autonomous robot solutions to the task board from top performing teams in our competition are tested in the "Bring your own Device" (BYOD) skill transferability challenge to redeploy the same robot skills on an electronic waste device. So far we have designed two task board focused on manipulation skills for the handling and disassembly of electronic waste and plan to release new designs annually.
Peter So's paper proposes an electronic task board to measure robotic manipulation performance remotely.
Send an email to Peter So (peter.so(at)tum.de) if you would like to get your own task board to join our growing community and benchmark your robot's performance.
ICRA 2024 will be running until 17th May, and will include plenary and keynote sessions, contributed paper sessions, workshops and tutorial sessions, forums, expo and exhibitions. More information regarding the event can be found by following this link.