The First WARA Robotics Mobile Manipulation Challenge -- Lessons Learned

The first WARA Robotics Mobile Manipulation Challenge, held in December 2024 at ABB Corporate Research in V\"aster{\aa}s, Sweden, addressed the automation of task-intensive and repetitive manual labor in laboratory environments - specifically the transport and cleaning of glassware. Designed in collaboration with AstraZeneca, the challenge invited academic teams to develop autonomous robotic systems capable of navigating human-populated lab spaces and performing complex manipulation tasks, such as loading items into industrial dishwashers. This paper presents an overview of the challenge setup, its industrial motivation, and the four distinct approaches proposed by the participating teams. We summarize lessons learned from this edition and propose improvements in design to enable a more effective second iteration to take place in 2025. The initiative bridges an important gap in effective academia-industry collaboration within the domain of autonomous mobile manipulation systems by promoting the development and deployment of applied robotic solutions in real-world laboratory contexts.

dPMP-Deep Probabilistic Motion Planning: A use case in Strawberry Picking Robot

This paper presents a novel probabilistic approach to deep robot learning from demonstrations (LfD). Deep movement primitives (DMPs) are deterministic LfD model that maps visual information directly into a robot trajectory. This paper extends DMPs and presents a deep probabilistic model that maps the visual information into a distribution of effective robot trajectories. The architecture that leads to the highest level of trajectory accuracy is presented and compared with the existing methods. Moreover, this paper introduces a novel training method for learning domain-specific latent features. We show the superiority of the proposed probabilistic approach and novel latent space learning in the lab's real-robot task of strawberry harvesting. The experimental results demonstrate that latent space learning can significantly improve model prediction performances. The proposed approach allows to sample trajectories from distribution and optimises the robot trajectory to meet a secondary objective, e.g. collision avoidance.