10th Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Competition

The 10th Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Competition is planned for the IEEE/RAS International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2025 in Atlanta, U.S.A.

RGMC has been running for nine editions at either the IEEE/RAS International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) or the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), since 2016. Across the editions, we engaged the community with various tasks for manufacturing, service robots, and logistics. These tasks include assembling and disassembling boards, hand-in-hand grasping, picking and placing various objects, pouring liquids into a cup, bin picking, rearranging and setting formal tables, folding and unfolding cloths, and receiving objects handed over by a person. RGMC will advance research and technology towards more realistic scenarios that can be encountered in daily activities at home or in warehouses, and will increase the interest of the community in solving the open challenges associated with robotic grasping and manipulation. Tracks and tasks have been re-proposed or changed across the various editions, reaching five tracks with different tasks in the last edition while attracting the interest of over 70 teams worldwide. The past RGMC events also received wide support from both academia and industry while also strengthening the ties between the two communities. The competitions demonstrated and assessed the state of art in the technical areas of robotic hands, grasping, and manipulation, and allowed us to identify new research problems and challenges to include within the tracks over time. 

RGMC aims at assessing the autonomous manipulation capabilities of a robotic arm when dealing with unknown or novel objects with varying physical properties and when handling scenarios with various degrees of uncertainty caused by a cluttered scene, random initial configurations, or human behaviors when interacting with the robot. For example, objects can vary in their shapes, appearances, transparency, deformability, and weight. Specifically, RGMC will challenge participants to design solutions that can perform outside of their labs and controlled conditions, within a limited time, and in some cases adapt to changing conditions within a task. To this end, RGMC gathers people from the community in a single hub instead of having isolated manipulation-related competitions that can fade away after one or a few events. RGMC helps promote the use of existing benchmarking protocols - already proposed by some of the RGMC organizers - to encourage their take up and revision. These benchmarking protocols also provide granular evaluations that help participants better understand their systems while encouraging research and assessments beyond the single overall scores limited to the competition.