Benchmarking via Competitions in Robotic Grasping and Manipulation - 2nd Edition

I am pleased to announce the Call for Contributions for the workshop "Benchmarking via Competitions in Robotic Grasping and Manipulation" (2nd edition) in conjunction with the 2025 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2025).

We are looking forward to receiving your submission! For more details, visit the workshop webpage:

Workshop Overview

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 nd 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.

Workshop Goals

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, we will:

• Engage with experts on the tasks and the winners of recent competitions
• Draw guidelines and directions for the reproducibility and comparison of future solutions
• Identify new challenges that arise from the discussion

Call for Contributions

Extended Abstracts (Unpublished Works)

We invite interested authors to submit Extended Abstracts (2 pages) of ongoing or unpublished works.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 abstracts should be in the form of a single PDF in IROS format (LaTex or Word) and submitted via the Microsoft CMT platform:

Abstracts (Published Works)

We also 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).

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

Topics of Interest

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 Deadlines

Note: 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 Institute and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
• Kaiyu Hang, Rice University
• Berk Calli, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
• Yu Sun, University of South Florida

Join Us!

Whether you're working on grasping algorithms, manipulation strategies, benchmarking frameworks, or competition design, we invite you to contribute to this workshop. This is a great opportunity to share your work, connect with leading researchers in the field, and help shape the future of robotic grasping and manipulation research.