Stretch Community News - June 2023
Welcome to the Hello Robot monthly community update!
June was a busy month for Stretch, with ICRA in London followed by the announcement of the Open Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation challenge to take place at NeurIPS 2023. Read on to learn how you could win your own Stretch robot!
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Project-based learning with Stretch is becoming more and more popular - last semester, students at five universities across the US used Stretch in course projects exploring mobile manipulation, from robot-assisted feeding to horticultural therapy. Click below to see videos and descriptions of some of their creative work!
Hello Robot and Meta AI are thrilled to announce the Open Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation Challenge - part of Meta’s ongoing HomeRobot project. The challenge requires a robot to navigate novel environments and manipulate novel objects, and will be judged both in simulation and on a physical Stretch in conjunction with NeurIPS 2023. The winner of the challenge will receive their own Stretch robot!
The HomeRobot OVMM project is intended as a benchmark enabling researchers to develop and test embodied agents on their ability to perform challenging tasks in real home environments. Researchers from GT, Meta AI, CMU, and Simon Fraser published this open-source benchmark, and their initial real-world results.
Research at Northeastern and Carnegie Mellon gives Stretch the ability to easily and reliably identify liquids and granular media. The SLURP robot uses a custom gripper and VNIR spectroscopy to sense the composition of liquid inside an unknown container as well as the container itself.
At CVPR 2023, CMU and Meta AI researchers presented the Vision Robotics Bridge - an approach to learn actionable representations by predicting contact points and post-contact trajectory as learned from human videos.