Robots on Demand: A Democratized Robotics Research CloudDownload PDF

Published: 01 Oct 2021, Last Modified: 05 May 2023CoRL 2021, Blue SkyReaders: Everyone
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.
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