The Cluttered Environment Picking Benchmark (CEPB) for Advanced Warehouse Automation: Evaluating the Perception, Planning, Control, and Grasping of Manipulation Systems

Autonomous and reliable robotic grasping is a desirable functionality in robotic manipulation and is still an open problem. Standardized benchmarks are important tools for evaluating and comparing robotic grasping and manipulation systems among different research groups and also for sharing with the community the best practices to learn from errors. An ideal benchmarking protocol should encompass the different aspects underpinning grasp execution, including the mechatronic design of grippers, planning, perception, and control to give information on each aspect and the overall problem. This article gives an overview of the benchmarks, datasets, and competitions that have been proposed and adopted in the last few years and presents a novel benchmark with protocols for different tasks that evaluate both the single components of the system and the system as a whole, introducing an evaluation metric that allows for a fair comparison in highly cluttered scenes taking into account the difficulty of the clutter. A website dedicated to the benchmark containing information on the different tasks, maintaining the leaderboards, and serving as a contact point for the community is also provided