Guest Editorial: Introduction to the Special Issue on Benchmarking Protocols for Robotic Manipulation

The papers in this special section focus on benchmarking protocols for robotic manipulation. Benchmarks are crucial for analyzing the effectiveness of an approach against a common basis, providing a quantitative means for interpreting performance. Carefully designed and widely recognized benchmarks encourage the research community to focus on certain key research challenges, promote competition, foster a climate for novel solutions, and, therefore, contribute dramatically to the advancement of a field. While some robotics-related fields (such as object recognition and segmentation) actively utilize benchmarks, there are essentially no robotic manipulation benchmarks that are widely adopted by the research community despite their highly acknowledged necessity.