In this paper, we present a model set for designing human-robot collaboration (HRC) experiments. It targets a common scenario in HRC, which is the collaborative assembly of furniture, and it consists of a combination of standard components and custom designs. With this work, we aim at reducing the amount of work required to set up and reproduce HRC experiments, and we provide a unified framework to facilitate the comparison and integration of contributions to the field. The model set is designed to be modular, extendable, and easy to distribute. Importantly, it covers the majority of relevant research in HRC, and it allows tuning of a number of experimental variables that are particularly valuable to the field. Additionally, we provide a set of software libraries for perception, control and interaction, with the goal of encouraging other researchers to proactively contribute to the proposed work.
Motion planning is a key problem in robotics that is concerned with finding a path that satisfies a goal specification subject to constraints. In its simplest form, the solution to this problem consists of finding a path connecting two states, and the only constraint is to avoid collisions. Even for this version of the motion planning problem, there is no efficient solution for the general case [1]. The addition of differential constraints on robot motion or more general goal specifications makes motion planning even harder. Given its complexity, most planning algorithms forego completeness and optimality for slightly weaker notions such as resolution completeness, probabilistic completeness [2], and asymptotic optimality.   We describe a humanoid robot platform - the iCub - which was designed to support collaborative research in cognitive development through autonomous exploration and social interaction. The motivation for this effort is the conviction that significantly greater impact can be leveraged by adopting an open systems policy for software and hardware development. This creates the need for a robust humanoid robot that offers rich perceptuo-motor capabilities with many degrees of freedom, a cognitive capacity for learning and development, a software architecture that encourages reuse & easy integration, and a support infrastructure that fosters collaboration and sharing of resources. The iCub satisfies all of these needs in the guise of an open-system platform which is freely available and which has attracted a growing community of users and developers. To date, twenty iCubs each comprising approximately 5000 mechanical and electrical parts have been delivered to several research labs in Europe and to one in the USA.    From mundane and repetitive tasks to assisting first responders in saving lives of victims in disaster scenarios, robots are expected to play an important role in our lives in the coming years. Despite recent advances in mobile robotic systems, lack of widely accepted performance metrics and standards hinder the progress in many application areas such as manufacturing, healthcare, and search and rescue. In this paper, we outline the importance of the development of standardized methods and objective performance evaluation benchmarking of existing and emerging robotic technologies. We provide a survey of significant past efforts by researchers and developers around the globe and discuss how we can leverage such efforts in advancing the state-of-the-art. Using an example of designing a ‘standard’ evaluation toolkit for robotic mapping, we illustrate some of the problems faced in developing objective performance metrics whilst accommodating the requirements and restrictions imposed by the intended domain of operation and other practical considerations.  At the Amazon Picking Challenge, 26 teams competed on their ability to pick items out of warehouse shelves. While the first year was largely focused on basic competencies, there are clear ways AI techniques can help make these systems more capable and robust. Randomized planners, search-based planners, potential-field approaches and trajectory optimization based motion planners are just some of the types of approaches that have been developed for motion planning. Given a motion planning problem, choosing the appropriate algorithm to use is a daunting task even for experts since there has been relatively little effort in comparing the plans generated by the different approaches, for different problems. In this paper, we present a set of benchmarks and the associated infrastructure for comparing different types of motion planning approaches and algorithms. The benchmarks are specifically designed for robotics and include typical indoor human environments. We present example motion planning problems for single arm tasks. Our infrastructure is designed to be easily extensible to allow for the addition of new planning approaches, new robots, new environments and new metrics. We present results comparing the performance of several motion planning algorithms to validate the use of these benchmarks. We introduce a novel humanoid robotic platform designed to jointly address three central goals of humanoid robotics: 1) study the role of morphology in biped locomotion; 2) study full-body compliant physical human-robot interaction; 3) be robust while easy and fast to duplicate to facilitate experimentation. The taken approach relies on functional modeling of certain aspects of human morphology, optimizing materials and geometry, as well as on the use of 3D printing techniques. In this article, we focus on the presentation of the design of specific morphological parts related to biped locomotion: the hip, the thigh, the limb mesh and the knee. We present initial experiments showing properties of the robot when walking with the physical guidance of a human.  