Call for Contributions

Advances in robotics, perception, and artificial intelligence are driving the expectation of robots having high-level capabilities to autonomously, accurately, and robustly address various tasks. However, crucial robotic capabilities such as autonomous assembly and disassembly, cloth manipulation, in-hand manipulation, object picking in cluttered environments, or object handover are far from being solved. Many research activities have focused on these subject topics over the last decades, but solutions have remained limited, and results have been demonstrated on custom workflows and validation tests designed in individual laboratories, considering distinct modalities and performance criteria. For this reason, benchmarking is important to enable reproducibility and comparison across different solutions and to advance the development of challenging robotic manipulation problems. In addition, competitions have been an effective way to drive scientific progress in recent years, spurring advances in robotics research.

This workshop aims to stimulate discussions within the research community from both academia and industry on the current and future challenges of autonomous robotic grasping and manipulation for real-world applications where research innovation meets engineering solutions for developing efficient and elegant systems in relevant environments outside the laboratory, with particular attention to benchmarking and competitions. To this end, we will engage with experts on the tasks and the winners of recent competitions. We will draw guidelines and directions for the reproducibility and comparison of future solutions and new challenges that arise from the discussion.

We invite interested authors to submit Extended Abstracts (2 pages) of ongoing or unpublished works.

Submitted extended abstracts will be peer-reviewed. Accepted abstracts will be posted on the workshop website and can be presented during the poster session. The best extended abstract will have the chance to give a talk during the main event of the workshop.

Extended abstract should be in the form of a single PDF in IROS format (LaTex or Word) and submitted via the Microsoft CMT platform (select Extended Abstract track): https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/RGMCW2025/.

We invite interested authors of relevant, already peer-reviewed and published works to submit title, abstract, and link to their journal article or conference paper via the Microsoft CMT platform (select Abstract track): https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/RGMCW2025/.

Submitted works will be checked for fitting to the workshop and can be presented during the poster session of the workshop.

List of Topics

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Grasping
• Manipulation
• Datasets related to robotic manipulation and grasping
• Learning grasping and manipulation from datasets
• Human-to-robot handovers
• Performance metrics and benchmarks
• Competitions for pick-and-place in logistics, daily living manipulation, manufacturing

Important dates

15 August: Extended Abstract (unpublished works) submission deadline
1 September: Acceptance notification
8 September: Camera-ready due
30 September: Abstract (published works) submission deadline
7 October: Acceptance notification (published works)
20 October: Workshop

Submission deadlines are at 11.59 pm Anywhere on Earth.

Organizers

• Salvatore D'Avella, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna
• Alessio Xompero, Queen Mary University of London
• Andrea Cavallaro, Idiap Research Institue and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
• Kaiyu Hang, Rice University
• Berk Calli, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
• Yu Sun, University of South Florida

IEEE Robotics and Automation Practice

Call for Papers

In a time when we see a large number of novel solutions published everyday for robotic grasping and manipulation, it has been a common confusion that we do not know which solutions are yet only excellent in specific lab settings or even only in simulations, and which are robustly ready for real-world deployment. In this special collection, we are interested in soliciting papers that emphasize addressing real-world problems with real-world solutions.

As such, we expect the submissions to be able to show and justify their real-world performance through solid benchmarking efforts, extensive and challenging experiments, or potentially real-world competitions in international conferences such as those organized in IEEE-RAS ICRA and IEEE/RSJ IROS.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Robot Assembly
• Robot Manufacturing
• Grasping
• Cloth Manipulation
• In-Hand Manipulation
• Picking in Clutter
• Human-to-Robot Handovers
• Nonprehensile Manipulation
• Dual-Arm Manipulation

Important dates

The deadline of submission is April 15, 2025.

Submission guidelines

• Submissions will undergo the RA-P review process as is set up by the Editorial Board.
• The submissions will be reviewed on a first-come first-served rolling basis.

Guest editors

• Yu Sun, University of South Florida
• Berk Calli, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
• Kenny Kimble, National Institute of Standards and Technology
• Francis Wyffels, Ghent University
• Kaiyu Hang, Rice University
• Salvatore D'Avella, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna
• Alessio Xompero, Queen Mary University of London
• Andrea Cavallaro, Idiap Research Institue and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
• Maximo A. Roa, German Aerospace Center
• Peter So, Technical University of Munich

Outstanding Reviewer at ECCV 2024

Glad to announce that this week I was selected as one of the Outstanding Reviewers out of 7,293 reviewers at the 2024 European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)!

This was my first time as a reviewer for this conference. I am grateful to the organising committee for the invitation and honoured for this recognition.
Congratulations also to all other outstanding reviewers!

I am also happy to see that this recognition follows the one I received at the 2024 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) in June, where I was also a first-time reviewer for the conference.

I believe that writing high-quality reviews and providing constructive feedback is a service to help and ensure the dissemination of research works that are relevant, impactful, and clear to readers in the community.

Some papers are ready for publication and presentation, and hence deserve a clear acknowledgement as a feedback. Other papers are in most of the cases not yet ready for publication and the feedback should clearly signal this while mentioning any strengths.

Glad that I could contribute to both conferences in a positive way, and I wish the authors, who did not get their papers presented at these conferences, the opportunity to improve their work for next event!