Dutch Data Prize 2024 win: The Impact-Aware Robotics Database 

Alessandro Saccon and Maarten Jongeneel (Twente University) are behind the project ‘The Impact-Aware Robotics Database‘, that showcases a database and a custom searching web interface supporting the development of impact-aware robotics – an emerging technology and research field focused on enabling robots to exploit intentional dynamic contact with surrounding objects and the environment.

The database can store a wide variety of datasets containing recorded impact experiments where robots, objects, and environments experience intentional collisions while performing dynamic robotic tasks. Examples are object tossing with robotic arms to speed up throughput or grabbing swiftly heavy objects. This open database, based on FAIR principles, provides access to data that supports research related to, e.g., modelling, robot learning, and vision-based object tracking. 

“We setup our database in such a way that the data is stored on the 4TU.ResearchData server and the custom search interface can query the server presenting the information in an application specific manner. The HDF5 datasets have a predefined structure and are jointly stored in a collection in the 4TU.ResearchData server. The collection grows as new datasets are added to it and all this information is fetched by the web search interface to show the database contents and the results of the users search” says Alessandro Saccon (University of Twente) who is behind this amazing project together with his colleague Maarten Jongeneel. 

“We are honored to have received the Dutch Data Prize. Setting up a database and a customized searching interface has required years of investment. We perceive the Dutch Data Prize as a great token of appreciation of this effort. Besides the information already available in on the webpage of the database, we are preparing a scientific publication explaining the database structure, with a preprint already available online for the interested researchers” adds Maarten.