We present joint learning of instance and semantic segmentation for visible and occluded region masks. Sharing the feature extractor with instance occlusion segmentation, we introduce semantic occlusion segmentation into the instance segmentation model. This joint learning fuses the instance- and image-level reasoning of the mask prediction on the different segmentation tasks, which was missing in the previous work of learning instance segmentation only (instance-only). In the experiments, we evaluated the proposed joint learning comparing the instance-only learning on the test dataset. We also applied the joint learning model to 2 different types of robotic pick-and-place tasks (random and target picking) and evaluated its effectiveness to achieve real-world robotic tasks.
Object pose estimation is a crucial prerequisite for robots to perform autonomous manipulation in clutter. Real-world bin-picking settings such as warehouses present additional challenges, e.g., new objects are added constantly. Most of the existing object pose estimation methods assume that 3D models of the objects is available beforehand. We present a pipeline that requires minimal human intervention and circumvents the reliance on the availability of 3D models by a fast data acquisition method and a synthetic data generation procedure. This work builds on previous work on semantic segmentat…
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；Federal University of Espirito Santo（圣埃斯皮里图联邦大学）
An important logistics application of robotics involves manipulators that pick-and-place objects placed in warehouse shelves. A critical aspect of this task corre- sponds to detecting the pose of a known object in the shelf using visual data. Solving this problem can be assisted by the use of an RGB-D sensor, which also provides depth information beyond visual data. Nevertheless, it remains a challenging problem since multiple issues need to be addressed, such as low illumination inside shelves, clutter, texture-less and reflective objects as well as the limitations of depth sensors. This pape…
University of Bonn（波恩大学）；University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
Autonomous robotic manipulation in clutter is challenging. A large variety of objects must be perceived in complex scenes, where they are partially occluded and embedded among many distractors, often in restricted spaces. To tackle these challenges, we developed a deep-learning approach that combines object detection and semantic segmentation. The manipulation scenes are captured with RGB-D cameras, for which we developed a depth fusion method. Employing pretrained features makes learning from small annotated robotic data sets possible. We evaluate our approach on two challenging data sets: on…
The food packaging industry handles an immense variety of food products with wide-ranging shapes and sizes, even within one kind of food. Menus are also diverse and change frequently, making automation of pick-and-place difficult. A popular approach to bin-picking is to first identify each piece of food in the tray by using an instance segmentation method. However, human annotations to train these methods are unreliable and error-prone since foods are packed close together with unclear boundaries and visual similarity making separation of pieces difficult. To address this problem, we propose a…
Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology（光州科学技术院）
Instance-aware segmentation of unseen objects is essential for a robotic system in an unstructured environment. Although previous works achieved encouraging results, they were limited to segmenting the only visible regions of unseen objects. For robotic manipulation in a cluttered scene, amodal perception is required to handle the occluded objects behind others. This paper addresses Unseen Object Amodal Instance Segmentation (UOAIS) to detect 1) visible masks, 2) amodal masks, and 3) occlusions on unseen object instances. For this, we propose a Hierarchical Occlusion Modeling (HOM) scheme desi…
In this paper we present Latent-Class Hough Forests, a method for object detection and 6 DoF pose estimation in heavily cluttered and occluded scenarios. We adapt a state of the art template matching feature into a scale-invariant patch descriptor and integrate it into a regression forest using a novel template-based split function. We train with positive samples only and we treat class distributions at the leaf nodes as latent variables. During testing we infer by iteratively updating these distributions, providing accurate estimation of background clutter and foreground occlusions and, thus,…
Recognizing objects in dense clutter accurately plays an important role to a wide variety of robotic manipulation tasks including grasping, packing, rearranging and many others. However, conventional visual recognition models usually miss objects because of the significant occlusion among instances and causes incorrect prediction due to the visual ambiguity with the high object crowdedness. In this paper, we propose an interactive exploration framework called Smart Explorer for recognizing all objects in dense clutters. Our Smart Explorer physically interacts with the clutter to maximize the r…
Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur（印度理工学院坎普尔分校）
In this paper, we present a semi supervised deep quick learning framework for instance detection and pixel-wise semantic segmentation of images in a dense clutter of items. The framework can quickly and incrementally learn novel items in an online manner by real-time data acquisition and generating corresponding ground truths on its own. To learn various combinations of items, it can synthesize cluttered scenes, in real time. The overall approach is based on the tutor-child analogy in which a deep network (tutor) is pretrained for class-agnostic object detection which generates labeled data fo…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）
Accurately estimating the shape of objects in dense clutters makes important contribution to robotic packing, because the optimal object arrangement requires the robot planner to acquire shape information of all existed objects. However, the objects for packing are usually piled in dense clutters with severe occlusion, and the object shape varies significantly across different instances for the same category. They respectively cause large object segmentation errors and inaccurate shape recovery on unseen instances, which both degrade the performance of shape estimation during deployment. In th…
We present a robotic system for picking a target from a pile of objects that is capable of finding and grasping the target object by removing obstacles in the appropriate order. The fundamental idea is to segment instances with both visible and occluded masks, which we call `instance occlusion segmentation'. To achieve this, we extend an existing instance segmentation model with a novel `relook' architecture, in which the model explicitly learns the inter-instance relationship. Also, by using image synthesis, we make the system capable of handling new objects without human annotations. The exp…
Images of heavily occluded objects in cluttered scenes, such as fruit clusters in trees, are hard to segment. To further retrieve the 3D size and 6D pose of each individual object in such cases, bounding boxes are not reliable from multiple views since only a little portion of the object's geometry is captured. We introduce the first CNN-based ellipse detector, called Ellipse R-CNN, to represent and infer occluded objects as ellipses. We first propose a robust and compact ellipse regression based on the Mask R-CNN architecture for elliptical object detection. Our method can infer the parameter…
This paper focuses on vision-based pose estimation for multiple rigid objects placed in clutter, especially in cases involving occlusions and objects resting on each other. Progress has been achieved recently in object recognition given advancements in deep learning. Nevertheless, such tools typically require a large amount of training data and significant manual effort to label objects. This limits their applicability in robotics, where solutions must scale to a large number of objects and variety of conditions. Moreover, the combinatorial nature of the scenes that could arise from the placem…
Wood logs picking is a challenging task to automate. Indeed, logs usually come in cluttered configurations, randomly orientated and overlapping. Recent work on log picking automation usually assume that the logs' pose is known, with little consideration given to the actual perception problem. In this paper, we squarely address the latter, using a data-driven approach. First, we introduce a novel dataset, named TimberSeg 1.0, that is densely annotated, i.e., that includes both bounding boxes and pixel-level mask annotations for logs. This dataset comprises 220 images with 2500 individually segm…
Clutt3R-Seg: Sparse-view 3D Instance Segmentation for Language-grounded Grasping in Cluttered Scenes
Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, SNU（机械工程系，首尔国立大学）；Interdisciplinary Program in Artificial Intelligence, SNU（人工智能跨学科项目，首尔国立大学）；Robotics Lab, Hyundai Motor Company（Hyundai Motor Company机器人实验室）
Interdisciplinary Program in AI, Seoul National University（首尔国立大学人工智能跨学科项目）；Artificial Intelligence Institute, Seoul National University（首尔国立大学人工智能研究所）；Department of Computer Science, Seoul National University（首尔国立大学计算机科学系）
This paper focuses on robotic picking tasks in cluttered scenario. Because of the diversity of poses, types of stack and complicated background in bin picking situation, it is much difficult to recognize and estimate their pose before grasping them. Here, this paper combines Resnet with U-net structure, a special framework of Convolution Neural Networks (CNN), to predict picking region without recognition and pose estimation. And it makes robotic picking system learn picking skills from scratch. At the same time, we train the network end to end with online samples. In the end of this paper, se…
In bin-picking scenarios, multiple instances of an object of interest are stacked in a pile randomly, and hence, the instances are inherently subjected to the challenges: severe occlusion, clutter, and similar-looking distractors. Most existing methods are, however, for single isolated object instances, while some recent methods tackle crowd scenarios as post-refinement which accounts multiple object relations. In this paper, we address recovering 6D poses of multiple instances in bin-picking scenarios in depth modality by multi-task learning in deep neural networks. Our architecture jointly l…
Modern object detection and instance segmentation networks stumble when picking out humans in crowded or highly occluded scenes. Yet, these are often scenarios where we require our detectors to work well. Many works have approached this problem with model-centric improvements. While they have been shown to work to some extent, these supervised methods still need sufficient relevant examples (i.e. occluded humans) during training for the improvements to be maximised. In our work, we propose a simple yet effective data-centric approach, Occlusion Copy & Paste, to introduce occluded examples to m…
Australian Centre for Robotic Vision（澳大利亚机器人视觉中心）；Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）
Camera viewpoint selection is an important aspect of visual grasp detection, especially in clutter where many occlusions are present. Where other approaches use a static camera position or fixed data collection routines, our Multi-View Picking (MVP) controller uses an active perception approach to choose informative viewpoints based directly on a distribution of grasp pose estimates in real time, reducing uncertainty in the grasp poses caused by clutter and occlusions. In trials of grasping 20 objects from clutter, our MVP controller achieves 80% grasp success, outperforming a single-viewpoint…
Khalifa University（哈利法大学）；Durham University（杜伦大学）；The University of Western Australia（西澳大利亚大学）；Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Detecting baggage threats is one of the most difficult tasks, even for expert officers. Many researchers have developed computer-aided screening systems to recognize these threats from the baggage X-ray scans. However, all of these frameworks are limited in identifying the contraband items under extreme occlusion. This paper presents a novel instance segmentation framework that utilizes trainable structure tensors to highlight the contours of the occluded and cluttered contraband items (by scanning multiple predominant orientations), while simultaneously suppressing the irrelevant baggage cont…
Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
This paper presents a robotic pick-and-place system that is capable of grasping and recognizing both known and novel objects in cluttered environments. The key new feature of the system is that it handles a wide range of object categories without needing any task-specific training data for novel objects. To achieve this, it first uses a category-agnostic affordance prediction algorithm to select and execute among four different grasping primitive behaviors. It then recognizes picked objects with a cross-domain image classification framework that matches observed images to product images. Since…
We address the manipulation task of retrieving a target object from a cluttered shelf. When the target object is hidden, the robot must search through the clutter for retrieving it. Solving this task requires reasoning over the likely locations of the target object. It also requires physics reasoning over multi-object interactions and future occlusions. In this work, we present a data-driven hybrid planner for generating occlusion-aware actions in closed-loop. The hybrid planner explores likely locations of the occluded target object as predicted by a learned distribution from the observation …
Clutter Resilient Occlusion Avoidance for Tightly-Coupled Motion-Assisted Detection
Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；University of Macau（澳门大学）；Weizmann Institute of Science（魏茨曼科学研究所）；Southern University of Science Technology（南方科技大学）
Khalifa University（哈利法大学）；Durham University（杜伦大学）；The University of Western Australia（西澳大学）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Automated systems designed for screening contraband items from the X-ray imagery are still facing difficulties with high clutter, concealment, and extreme occlusion. In this paper, we addressed this challenge using a novel multi-scale contour instance segmentation framework that effectively identifies the cluttered contraband data within the baggage X-ray scans. Unlike standard models that employ region-based or keypoint-based techniques to generate multiple boxes around objects, we propose to derive proposals according to the hierarchy of the regions defined by the contours. The proposed fram…
We introduce a novel method for 3D object detection and pose estimation from color images only. We first use segmentation to detect the objects of interest in 2D even in presence of partial occlusions and cluttered background. By contrast with recent patch-based methods, we rely on a "holistic" approach: We apply to the detected objects a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) trained to predict their 3D poses in the form of 2D projections of the corners of their 3D bounding boxes. This, however, is not sufficient for handling objects from the recent T-LESS dataset: These objects exhibit an axis o…
Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA（弗劳恩霍夫制造工程与自动化研究所（IPA））
In this paper, we introduce a novel learning-based approach for grasping known rigid objects in highly cluttered scenes and precisely placing them based on depth images. Our Placement Quality Network (PQ-Net) estimates the object pose and the quality for each automatically generated grasp pose for multiple objects simultaneously at 92 fps in a single forward pass of a neural network. All grasping and placement trials are executed in a physics simulation and the gained experience is transferred to the real world using domain randomization. We demonstrate that our policy successfully transfers t…
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Industrial bin picking is a challenging task that requires accurate and robust segmentation of individual object instances. Particularly, industrial objects can have irregular shapes, that is, thin and concave, whereas in bin-picking scenarios, objects are often closely packed with strong occlusion. To address these challenges, we formulate a novel part-aware instance segmentation pipeline. The key idea is to decompose industrial objects into correlated approximate convex parts and enhance the object-level segmentation with part-level segmentation. We design a part-aware network to predict par…
Picking objects in a narrow space such as shelf bins is an important task for humanoid to extract target object from environment. In those situations, however, there are many occlusions between the camera and objects, and this makes it difficult to segment the target object three dimensionally because of the lack of three dimentional sensor inputs. We address this problem with accumulating segmentation result with multiple camera angles, and generating voxel model of the target object. Our approach consists of two components: first is object probability prediction for input image with convolut…
Korea Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术研究院）
This paper presents a task and motion planning (TAMP) framework for a robotic manipulator in order to retrieve a target object from clutter. We consider a configuration of objects in a confined space with a high density so no collision-free path to the target exists. The robot must relocate some objects to retrieve the target without collisions. For fast completion of object rearrangement, the robot aims to optimize the number of pick-and-place actions which often determines the efficiency of a TAMP framework. We propose a task planner incorporating motion planning to generate executable plans…
NVIDIA（英伟达）；The Robotics Institute, CMU（卡内基梅隆大学机器人研究所）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
Grasping in cluttered environments is a fundamental but challenging robotic skill. It requires both reasoning about unseen object parts and potential collisions with the manipulator. Most existing data-driven approaches avoid this problem by limiting themselves to top-down planar grasps which is insufficient for many real-world scenarios and greatly limits possible grasps. We present a method that plans 6-DOF grasps for any desired object in a cluttered scene from partial point cloud observations. Our method achieves a grasp success of 80.3%, outperforming baseline approaches by 17.6% and clea…
Many methods have been developed for planning the motion of robotic arms for picking and placing, ranging from local optimization to global search techniques, which are effective for sparsely placed objects. Dense clutter, however, still adversely affects the success rate, computation times, and quality of solutions in many real-world setups. The current work integrates tools from existing methodologies and proposes a framework that achieves high success ratio in clutter with anytime performance. The idea is to first explore the lower dimensional end effector's task space efficiently by ignori…
Australian Centre for Robotic Vision (ACRV)（澳大利亚机器人视觉中心（ACRV））；Queensland University of Technology (QUT)（昆士兰科技大学（QUT））；University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；Australian National University (ANU)（澳大利亚国立大学（ANU））
Robotic manipulation and grasping in cluttered and unstructured environments is a current challenge for robotics. Enabling robots to operate in these challenging environments have direct applications from automating warehouses to harvesting fruit in agriculture. One of the main challenges associated with these difficult robotic manipulation tasks is the motion planning and control problem for multi-DoF (Degree of Freedom) manipulators. This paper presents the design and performance evaluation of a low-cost Cartesian manipulator, Cartman who took first place in the Amazon Robotics Challenge 201…
Korea Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术研究院）
We present an algorithm determining where to relocate objects inside a cluttered and confined space while rearranging objects to retrieve a target object. Although methods that decide what to remove have been proposed, planning for the placement of removed objects inside a workspace has not received much attention. Rather, removed objects are often placed outside the workspace, which incurs additional laborious work (e.g., motion planning and execution of the manipulator and the mobile base, perception of other areas). Some other methods manipulate objects only inside the workspace but without…
In this paper, we propose a novel edge and corner detection algorithm for an unorganized point cloud. Our edge detection method classifies a query point as an edge point by evaluating the distribution of local neighboring points around the query point. The proposed technique has been tested on generic items such as dragons, bunnies, and coffee cups from the Stanford 3D scanning repository. The proposed technique can be directly applied to real and unprocessed point cloud data of random clutter of objects. To demonstrate the proposed technique's efficacy, we compare it to the other solutions fo…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；NVIDIA Research（英伟达研究院）
Successfully tracking the human body is an important perceptual challenge for robots that must work around people. Existing methods fall into two broad categories: geometric tracking and direct pose estimation using machine learning. While recent work has shown direct estimation techniques can be quite powerful, geometric tracking methods using point clouds can provide a very high level of 3D accuracy which is necessary for many robotic applications. However these approaches can have difficulty in clutter when large portions of the subject are occluded. To overcome this limitation, we propose …
GS-NBV: a Geometry-based, Semantics-aware Viewpoint Planning Algorithm for Avocado Harvesting under Occlusions
Autonomous Robots and Control Systems Lab, University of California, Riverside（加州大学河滨分校自主机器人与控制系统实验室）；Perception, Robotics, AI, Sensing Lab, University of Colorado, Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校感知、机器人、人工智能与传感实验室）
College of Computer and Information Science（计算机与信息科学学院）；Northeastern University（东北大学）
We address a class of manipulation problems where the robot perceives the scene with a depth sensor and can move its end effector in a space with six degrees of freedom -- 3D position and orientation. Our approach is to formulate the problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) with abstract yet generally applicable state and action representations. Finding a good solution to the MDP requires adding constraints on the allowed actions. We develop a specific set of constraints called hierarchical $\text{SE}(3)$ sampling (HSE3S) which causes the robot to learn a sequence of gazes to focus attention…
Università degli studi di Milano（米兰大学）；Örebro Universitet（厄勒布鲁大学）；Aalto University（阿尔托大学）；Politecnico di Milano（米兰理工大学）
Identifying the environment's structure, i.e., to detect core components as rooms and walls, can facilitate several tasks fundamental for the successful operation of indoor autonomous mobile robots, including semantic environment understanding. These robots often rely on 2D occupancy maps for core tasks such as localisation and motion and task planning. However, reliable identification of structure and room segmentation from 2D occupancy maps is still an open problem due to clutter (e.g., furniture and movable object), occlusions, and partial coverage. We propose a method for the RObust Struct…
Dorabot Inc.（多拉机器人公司）；University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Advanced Industrial Science and Technology（日本产业技术综合研究所）；University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）
Robots that autonomously manipulate objects within warehouses have the potential to shorten the package delivery time and improve the efficiency of the e-commerce industry. In this paper, we present a robotic system that is capable of both picking and placing general objects in warehouse scenarios. Given a target object, the robot autonomously detects it from a shelf or a table and estimates its full 6D pose. With this pose information, the robot picks the object using its gripper, and then places it into a container or at a specified location. We describe our pick-and-place system in detail w…
Flexible pick-and-place is a fundamental yet challenging task within robotics, in particular due to the need of an object model for a simple target pose definition. In this work, the robot instead learns to pick-and-place objects using planar manipulation according to a single, demonstrated goal state. Our primary contribution lies within combining robot learning of primitives, commonly estimated by fully-convolutional neural networks, with one-shot imitation learning. Therefore, we define the place reward as a contrastive loss between real-world measurements and a task-specific noise distribu…
Korea Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术研究院）；Inha University（仁荷大学）
We consider the problem of retrieving a target object from a confined space by two robotic manipulators where overhand grasps are not allowed. If other movable obstacles occlude the target, more than one object should be relocated to clear the path to reach the target object. With two robots, the relocation could be done efficiently by simultaneously performing relocation tasks. However, the precedence constraint between the tasks (e.g, some objects at the front should be removed to manipulate the objects in the back) makes the simultaneous task execution difficult. We propose a coordination m…
