Special issue on autonomous grasping and manipulation

Grasping and manipulation of objects are essential motor skills for robots to interact with their environment and perform meaningful, physical tasks. Since the dawn of robotics, grasping and manipulation have formed a core research field with a large number of dedicated publications. The field has reached an important milestone in recent years as various robots can now reliably perform basic grasps on unknown objects. However, these robots are still far from being capable of human-level manipulation skills including in-hand or bimanual manipulation of objects, interactions with nonrigid objects, and multi-object tasks such as stacking and tool-usage. Progress on such advanced manipulation skills is slowed down by requiring a successful combination of a multitude of different methods and technologies, e.g., robust vision, tactile feedback, grasp stability analysis, modeling of uncertainty, learning, long-term planning, and much more. In order to address these difficult issues, there have been an increasing number of governmental research programs such as theEuropeanprojectsDEXMART,GeRTandGRASP, and