  In this paper we present the Yale-CMU-Berkeley (YCB) Object and Model set,
intended to be used to facilitate benchmarking in robotic manipulation,
prosthetic design and rehabilitation research. The objects in the set are
designed to cover a wide range of aspects of the manipulation problem; it
includes objects of daily life with different shapes, sizes, textures, weight
and rigidity, as well as some widely used manipulation tests. The associated
database provides high-resolution RGBD scans, physical properties, and
geometric models of the objects for easy incorporation into manipulation and
planning software platforms. In addition to describing the objects and models
in the set along with how they were chosen and derived, we provide a framework
and a number of example task protocols, laying out how the set can be used to
quantitatively evaluate a range of manipulation approaches including planning,
learning, mechanical design, control, and many others. A comprehensive
literature survey on existing benchmarks and object datasets is also presented
and their scope and limitations are discussed. The set will be freely
distributed to research groups worldwide at a series of tutorials at robotics
conferences, and will be otherwise available at a reasonable purchase cost. It
is our hope that the ready availability of this set along with the ground laid
in terms of protocol templates will enable the community of manipulation
researchers to more easily compare approaches as well as continually evolve
benchmarking tests as the field matures.
