A Cross-Embodiment Gripper Benchmark for Rigid-Object Manipulation in Aerial and Industrial Robotics

TL;DR

<3-5 sentence high-level summary> The paper presents the Cross-Embodiment Gripper Benchmark (CEGB), a framework that extends YCB and NIST benchmarks with transferability, energy efficiency, and intent-specific payload metrics to evaluate grippers across heterogeneous robotic embodiments (aerial, industrial, and collaborative platforms). It introduces a self-locking reference gripper prototype and open-source data to enable reproducible, cross-platform comparisons, including a Transfer Time Benchmark, an Energy Consumption Benchmark, and an Intent-Specific Ideal Payload Benchmark. Experimental results show rapid cross-embodiment transfer, low holding energy, and robust grasp performance across object classes, with quantified statistics (medians, IQRs, bootstrap CIs) to support transparent comparisons. CEGB thus provides a practical, energy-aware, platform-agnostic foundation for evaluating and designing grippers capable of reuse across diverse robotic systems.

Abstract

Robotic grippers are increasingly deployed across industrial, collaborative, and aerial platforms, where each embodiment imposes distinct mechanical, energetic, and operational constraints. Established YCB and NIST benchmarks quantify grasp success, force, or timing on a single platform, but do not evaluate cross-embodiment transferability or energy-aware performance, capabilities essential for modern mobile and aerial manipulation. This letter introduces the Cross-Embodiment Gripper Benchmark (CEGB), a compact and reproducible benchmarking suite extending YCB and selected NIST metrics with three additional components: a transfer-time benchmark measuring the practical effort required to exchange embodiments, an energy-consumption benchmark evaluating grasping and holding efficiency, and an intent-specific ideal payload assessment reflecting design-dependent operational capability. Together, these metrics characterize both grasp performance and the suitability of reusing a single gripper across heterogeneous robotic systems. A lightweight self-locking gripper prototype is implemented as a reference case. Experiments demonstrate rapid embodiment transfer (median ~= 17.6 s across user groups), low holding energy for gripper prototype (~= 1.5 J per 10 s), and consistent grasp performance with cycle times of 3.2 - 3.9 s and success rates exceeding 90%. CEGB thus provides a reproducible foundation for cross-platform, energy-aware evaluation of grippers in aerial and manipulators domains.

Figures (9)

• Figure 1: Overview of the Cross-Embodiment Gripper Benchmark (CEGB). A common reference gripper is mounted on different robotic platforms—a collaborative manipulator, mobile robot with manipulator and UAV—to evaluate cross-embodiment transfer, mounting compatibility, and performance under different actuation and environmental conditions.
• Figure 2: Reference gripper prototype performance metric results based on the YCB benchmark.
• Figure 3: Determination of the reference gripper prototype grasp cycle time following the NIST procedure.
• Figure 4: Experimental setup for the slip-resistance test based on the NIST methodology.
• Figure 5: Experimental sequence for participants to attach and detach the reference gripper prototype.