MotionBenchMaker: A Tool to Generate and Benchmark Motion Planning Datasets

C. Chamzas, C. Quintero-Peña, Z. Kingston, A. Orthey, D. Rakita, M. Gleicher, M. Toussaint, and L. E. Kavraki, “MotionBenchMaker: A Tool to Generate and Benchmark Motion Planning Datasets,” IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 882–889, Apr. 2022.

Abstract

Recently, there has been a wealth of development in motion planning for robotic manipulationnew motion planners are continuously proposed, each with its own unique set of strengths and weaknesses. However, evaluating these new planners is challenging, and researchers often create their own ad-hoc problems for benchmarking, which is time-consuming, prone to bias, and does not directly compare against other state-of-the-art planners. We present MotionBenchMaker, an open-source tool to generate benchmarking datasets for realistic robot manipulation problems. MotionBenchMaker is designed to be an extensible, easy-to-use tool that allows users to both generate datasets and benchmark them by comparing motion planning algorithms. Empirically, we show the benefit of using MotionBenchMaker as a tool to procedurally generate datasets which helps in the fair evaluation of planners. We also present a suite of over 40 prefabricated datasets, with 5 different commonly used robots in 8 environments, to serve as a common ground for future motion planning research.

Publisher: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2021.3133603

PDF preprint: http://kavrakilab.org/publications/chamzas2022-motion-bench-maker.pdf