Robots on Demand: A Democratized Robotics Research Cloud

Victoria Dean, Yonadav G Shavit, Abhinav Gupta

Keywords: Remote robotics, open-source, benchmarking

TL;DR: We propose a Robotics Research Cloud: a center containing remotely-accessible robots in standard environments, accelerating data collection and benchmarking as a field.

Abstract: Robotics research is slowed by three challenges: building a robotics lab is expensive (few participants), everyone uses different robots (participants’ findings often don’t generalize outside their lab), and there is no internet-scale robotics dataset (no lab has the resources to make many robots do many different tasks to generate data and there is no data in the wild). The solution is to build a “Robotics Research Cloud” consisting of centers filled with remotely operable robots in standardized environments. This would be a valuable resource in pushing forward robot learning as a field by making cutting-edge robotics research broadly accessible, helping the field identify promising new approaches that succeed on agreed benchmarks, and creating a massive real-world robotics dataset similar to those that have revolutionized machine learning for vision and language.