Competition tracks

The Picking in Clutter track will challenge the teams to design solutions that, given a set of known and unknown objects placed randomly within a clear box, will enable a robotic arm to pick and place each object into a second clear box within a maximum allowed time to fully clear the first box. Differently from the track of the last 9th RGMC where every team could decide the grasp sequence depending on their convenience, this year an additional complexity will challenge the teams since the grasping order will be predefined and the teams should respect the sequence of grasping commanded through a ROS topic/service mimicking a communication with a PLC as in industrial environments. This means that additional strategies like pushing for decluttering and looking for the target object in the clutter are required. 

The goal is to progress the design of vision and manipulation systems that can handle heterogeneous and novel objects with different physical properties even in the clutter conditions of (sequential) bin-picking scenarios. 

Primary contact: Salvatore D'Avella
Further details: This track is designed and Stage 3 of the Cluttered Environment Picking Benchmark (CEPB) paper reference below. For more information on this track, please refer to the CEPB webpage at http://cepbbenchmark.eu/.

Further details: https://corsmal.github.io/events/rgmc/icra2026 

Primary contacts: Changjae Oh (c.oh@qmul.ac.uk) and Andrea Cavallaro

The Human-to-Robot Handovers track will challenge the teams to design solutions that enable a robot to estimate the physical properties of an object while handed over by a person. The robot then will need to complete the handover by safely and stably receiving the object and delivering it to a predefined location on the table. The goal is to assess the generalization capabilities of the robotic control when receiving unknown objects that are filled (or not) with unknown content, hence with a different and unknown mass and stiffness. Challenges include illumination variations, transparencies, reflective surfaces, occlusions caused both by the human and the robot, and safe grasps, while using an affordable experimental setup.

Past editions: ICRA 2024 | ICRA 2025

Further details: (coming soon)

Primary contacts: Narcis Miguel (narcis.miguel@pal-robotics.com)

The Mobile Manipulation track will focus on conducting an assembly task with a mobile platform. We will utilize a version of the NIST taskboards and a mobile robot will be expected to identify industrial pieces, pick them up, and insert them into target locations. The goal is to assess the manipulation capabilities of the mobile robot, while managing varying camera viewpoints and pose uncertainties caused by the moving platform. In some tasks, base-arm coordination will be required to retrieve and insert the objects.

This track will leverage the prior competition organization experiences of PAL Robotics (see https://pal-robotics.com/blog/tag/robotics-competition/) along with the below benchmarking protocols and scoring methods.