Rigid-Soft Interactive Learning for Robust Grasping
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；AncoraSpring, Inc.（安科睿泉公司）；SUSTech Institute of Robotics（南方科技大学机器人研究院）
Inspired by widely used soft fingers on grasping, we propose a method of rigid-soft interactive learning, aiming at reducing the time of data collection. In this paper, we classify the interaction categories into Rigid-Rigid, Rigid-Soft, Soft-Rigid according to the interaction surface between grippers and target objects. We find experimental evidence that the interaction types between grippers and target objects play an essential role in the learning methods. We use soft, stuffed toys for training, instead of everyday objects, to reduce the integration complexity and computational burden and exploit such rigid-soft interaction by changing the gripper fingers to the soft ones when dealing with rigid, daily-life items such as the Yale-CMU-Berkeley (YCB) objects. With a small data collection of 5K picking attempts in total, our results suggest that such Rigid-Soft and Soft-Rigid interactions are transferable. Moreover, the combination of different grasp types shows better performance on the grasping test. We achieve the best grasping performance at 97.5\% for easy YCB objects and 81.3\% for difficult YCB objects while using a precise grasp with a two-soft-finger gripper to collect training data and power grasp with a four-soft-finger gripper to test.
Grasping objects of different shapes and sizes - a foundational, effortless skill for humans - remains a challenging task in robotics. Although model-based approaches can predict stable grasp configurations for known object models, they struggle to generalize to novel objects and often operate in a non-interactive open-loop manner. In this work, we present a reinforcement learning framework that learns the interactive grasping of various geometrically distinct real-world objects by continuously controlling an anthropomorphic robotic hand. We explore several explicit representations of object g…
University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；SUSTech Institute of Intelligent Manufacturing（南方科技大学智能制造研究院）
This paper presents a novel design of a soft tactile finger with omni-directional adaptation using multi-channel optical fibers for rigid-soft interactive grasping. Machine learning methods are used to train a model for real-time prediction of force, torque, and contact using the tactile data collected. We further integrated such fingers in a reconfigurable gripper design with three fingers so that the finger arrangement can be actively adjusted in real-time based on the tactile data collected during grasping, achieving the process of rigid-soft interactive grasping. Detailed sensor calibratio…
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
Over the past few decades, efforts have been made towards robust robotic grasping, and therefore dexterous manipulation. The soft gripper has shown their potential in robust grasping due to their inherent properties-low, control complexity, and high adaptability. However, the deformation of the soft gripper when interacting with objects bring inaccuracy of grasped objects, which causes instability for robust grasping and further manipulation. In this paper, we present an omni-directional adaptive soft finger that can sense deformation based on embedded optical fibers and the application of mac…
Interactive robotic grasping using natural language is one of the most fundamental tasks in human-robot interaction. However, language can be a source of ambiguity, particularly when there are ambiguous visual or linguistic contents. This paper investigates the use of object attributes in disambiguation and develops an interactive grasping system capable of effectively resolving ambiguities via dialogues. Our approach first predicts target scores and attribute scores through vision-and-language grounding. To handle ambiguous objects and commands, we propose an attribute-guided formulation of t…
LangGrasp: Leveraging Fine-Tuned LLMs for Language Interactive Robot Grasping with Ambiguous Instructions
School of Computer Science and Technology（计算机科学与技术学院）；Hubei Province Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing and Real-time Industrial System（湖北省智能信息处理与实时工业系统重点实验室）；Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems（机器人与智能系统研究院）；Wuhan University of Science and Technology（武汉理工大学）
Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
In this paper, we propose a object detection method expressed as rotated bounding box to solve grasping challenge in the scenes where rigid objects and soft objects are mixed together. Compared with traditional detection methods, this method can output the angle information of rotated objects and thus can guarantee that within each rotated bounding box, there is a single instance. This technology is especially useful in the case of pile of objects with different orientations. In our method, when uncategorized objects with specific geometry shapes (rectangle or cylinder) are detected, the progr…
Objects within a category are often similar in their shape and usage. When we---as humans---want to grasp something, we transfer our knowledge from past experiences and adapt it to novel objects. In this paper, we propose a new approach for transferring grasping skills that accumulates grasping knowledge into a category-level canonical model. Grasping motions for novel instances of the category are inferred from geometric deformations between the observed instance and the canonical shape. Correspondences between the shapes are established by means of a non-rigid registration method that combin…
Instance segmentation with unseen objects is a challenging problem in unstructured environments. To solve this problem, we propose a robot learning approach to actively interact with novel objects and collect each object's training label for further fine-tuning to improve the segmentation model performance, while avoiding the time-consuming process of manually labeling a dataset. The Singulation-and-Grasping (SaG) policy is trained through end-to-end reinforcement learning. Given a cluttered pile of objects, our approach chooses pushing and grasping motions to break the clutter and conducts ob…
Robots acting in open environments need to be able to handle novel objects. Based on the observation that objects within a category are often similar in their shapes and usage, we propose an approach for transferring grasping skills from known instances to novel instances of an object category. Correspondences between the instances are established by means of a non-rigid registration method that combines the Coherent Point Drift approach with subspace methods. The known object instances are modeled using a canonical shape and a transformation which deforms it to match the instance shape. The p…
Grasping by Spiraling: Reproducing Elephant Movements with Rigid-Soft Robot Synergy
Advanced Robotics Centre, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学先进机器人中心）；Integrative Sciences and Engineering Programme, National University of Singapore Graduate School（新加坡国立大学研究生院整合科学与工程计划）；School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)（新加坡科技研究局高性能计算研究所）
This paper presents a novel approach to numerically describe the interactions between rigid bodies, with a special focus on robotic grasping. Some of the more common approaches used to address such issues rely on satisfaction of a set of strict constraints, descriptive of the expected physical reality of such interactions in practice. However, application of constraint-based methods in a numerical setting may lead to problematic configurations in which, for instance, volumes occupied by distinct bodies may overlap. Such situations lying beyond the range of admissible configurations for constra…
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利理工学院）；University of Naples Federico II（那不勒斯费德里科二世大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Handling non-rigid objects using robot hands necessities a framework that does not only incorporate human-level dexterity and cognition but also the multi-sensory information and system dynamics for robust and fine interactions. In this research, our previously developed kernelized synergies framework, inspired from human behaviour on reusing same subspace for grasping and manipulation, is augmented with visuo-tactile perception for autonomous and flexible adaptation to unknown objects. To detect objects and estimate their poses, a simplified visual pipeline using RANSAC algorithm with Euclide…
Physical Human-Robot Interaction for Grasping in Augmented Reality via Rigid-Soft Robot Synergy
Advanced Robotics Centre (ARC), National University of Singapore (NUS)（先进机器人中心（ARC），新加坡国立大学）；Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)（高性能计算研究所（IHPC），科技研究局（A*STAR））；Chair of Cognitive Systems, Technical University of Munich (TUM)（认知系统教授职位，慕尼黑技术大学）；Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) Centre（新加坡-麻省理工联合研究技术中心）；Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), Massachusetts Institute of Technology（计算机科学与人工智能实验室（CSAIL），麻省理工学院）
Hybrid Gripper with Passive Pneumatic Soft Joints for Grasping Deformable Thin Objects
School of Mechanical Engineering, Hanoi University of Science and Technology（河内科技大学机械工程学院）；Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool（利物浦大学计算机科学系）；Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo（东京大学信息科学与技术研究生院）
We investigate grasping of rigid objects in unilateral robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RAMIS) in this paper. We define a human-centered transparency that quantifies natural action and perception in RAMIS. We demonstrate this human-centered transparency analysis for different values of gripper scaling - the scaling between the grasp aperture of the surgeon-side manipulator and the aperture of the surgical instrument grasper. Thirty-one participants performed teleoperated grasping and perceptual assessment of rigid objects in one of three gripper scaling conditions (fine, normal, and …
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Shenzhen Research Institute, The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学深圳研究院）
To facilitate recent advances in robotics and AI for delicate collaboration between humans and machines, we propose the Kinova Gemini, an original robotic system that integrates conversational AI dialogue and visual reasoning to make the Kinova Gen3 lite robot help people retrieve objects or complete perception-based pick-and-place tasks. When a person walks up to Kinova Gen3 lite, our Kinova Gemini is able to fulfill the user's requests in three different applications: (1) It can start a natural dialogue with people to interact and assist humans to retrieve objects and hand them to the user o…
Rigid grippers used in existing aerial manipulators require precise positioning to achieve successful grasps and transmit large contact forces that may destabilize the drone. This limits the speed during grasping and prevents "dynamic grasping", where the drone attempts to grasp an object while moving. On the other hand, biological systems (e.g., birds) rely on compliant and soft parts to dampen contact forces and compensate for grasping inaccuracy, enabling impressive feats. This paper presents the first prototype of a soft drone -- a quadrotor where traditional (i.e., rigid) landing gears ar…
Billions of people use chopsticks, a simple yet versatile tool, for fine manipulation of everyday objects. The small, curved, and slippery tips of chopsticks pose a challenge for picking up small objects, making them a suitably complex test case. This paper leverages human demonstrations to develop an autonomous chopsticks-equipped robotic manipulator. Due to the lack of accurate models for fine manipulation, we explore model-free imitation learning, which traditionally suffers from the covariate shift phenomenon that causes poor generalization. We propose two approaches to reduce covariate sh…
University of Bonn（波恩大学）；Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna（圣安娜高等研究院）
Every time a person encounters an object with a given degree of familiarity, he/she immediately knows how to grasp it. Adaptation of the movement of the hand according to the object geometry happens effortlessly because of the accumulated knowledge of previous experiences grasping similar objects. In this paper, we present a novel method for inferring grasp configurations based on the object shape. Grasping knowledge is gathered in a synergy space of the robotic hand built by following a human grasping taxonomy. The synergy space is constructed through human demonstrations employing a exoskele…
University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）
Current rigid linkage grippers are limited in flexibility, and gripper design optimality relies on expertise, experiments, or arbitrary parameters. Our proposed rigid gripper can accommodate irregular and off-center objects through a whippletree mechanism, improving adaptability. We present a whippletree-based rigid under-actuated gripper and its parametric design multi-objective optimization for a one-wall climbing task. Our proposed objective function considers kinematics and grasping forces simultaneously with a mathematical metric based on a model of an object environment. Our multi-object…
What is the right object representation for manipulation? We would like robots to visually perceive scenes and learn an understanding of the objects in them that (i) is task-agnostic and can be used as a building block for a variety of manipulation tasks, (ii) is generally applicable to both rigid and non-rigid objects, (iii) takes advantage of the strong priors provided by 3D vision, and (iv) is entirely learned from self-supervision. This is hard to achieve with previous methods: much recent work in grasping does not extend to grasping specific objects or other tasks, whereas task-specific l…
We consider a novel problem where multiple rigid convex polygonal objects rest in randomly placed positions and orientations on a planar surface visible from an overhead camera. The objective is to efficiently grasp and transport all objects into a bin using multi-object push-grasps, where multiple objects are pushed together to facilitate multi-object grasping. We provide necessary conditions for frictionless multi-object push-grasps and apply these to filter inadmissible grasps in a novel multi-object grasp planner. We find that our planner is 19 times faster than a Mujoco simulator baseline…
Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic)（阿米尔卡比尔理工大学（德黑兰理工学院））
Soft grippers, for stable grasping of objects, with high compliance could be considered a suitable candidate for replacement of conventional rigid grippers, and in recent years, they have been emerging exponentially in industries. Not only are these highly adaptable grippers capable of static grasping of an object, but also they can be utilized for performing object manipulation tasks. Plenty of contemporary studies have been emphasizing on static grasping ability of soft grippers. However, in this thesis, planar in-hand object manipulation in a soft gripper which comprises a pair of soft fing…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Madras Institute of Technology, Anna University（安娜大学马德拉斯理工学院）
A robot operating in unstructured environments must be able to discriminate between different grasping styles depending on the prospective manipulation task. Having a system that allows learning from remote non-expert demonstrations can very feasibly extend the cognitive skills of a robot for task-oriented grasping. We propose a novel two-step framework towards this aim. The first step involves grasp area estimation by segmentation. We receive grasp area demonstrations for a new task via interactive segmentation, and learn from these few demonstrations to estimate the required grasp area on an…
Soft robotic hands and grippers are increasingly attracting attention as a robotic end-effector. Compared with rigid counterparts, they are safer for human-robot and environment-robot interactions, easier to control, lower cost and weight, and more compliant. Current soft robotic hands have mostly focused on the soft fingers and bending actuators. However, the palm is also essential part for grasping. In this work, we propose a novel design of soft humanoid hand with pneumatic soft fingers and soft palm. The hand is inexpensive to fabricate. The configuration of the soft palm is based on modul…
Accurately simulating whether an object will be lifted securely or dropped during grasping is a longstanding Sim2Real challenge. Soft compliant jaw tips are almost universally used with parallel-jaw robot grippers due to their ability to increase contact area and friction between the jaws and the object to be manipulated. However, interactions between the compliant surfaces and rigid objects are notoriously difficult to model. We introduce IPC-GraspSim, a novel grasp simulator that extends Incremental Potential Contact (IPC) - a highly accurate collision + deformation model developed in 2020 f…
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）
Soft grippers are receiving growing attention due to their compliance-based interactive safety and dexterity. Hybrid gripper (soft actuators enhanced by rigid constraints) is a new trend in soft gripper design. With right structural components actuated by soft actuators, they could achieve excellent grasping adaptability and payload, while also being easy to model and control with conventional kinematics. However, existing works were mostly focused on achieving superior payload and perception with simple planar workspaces, resulting in far less dexterity compared with conventional grippers. In…
BaRiFlex: A Robotic Gripper with Versatility and Collision Robustness for Robot Learning
Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin（机械工程系，德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Department of Computer Science, The University of Texas at Austin（计算机科学系，德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
National Taiwan University（台湾大学）；Mobile Drive Technology（移动驱动科技公司）
Object detection plays a deep role in visual systems by identifying instances for downstream algorithms. In industrial scenarios, however, a slight change in manufacturing systems would lead to costly data re-collection and human annotation processes to re-train models. Existing solutions such as semi-supervised and few-shot methods either rely on numerous human annotations or suffer low performance. In this work, we explore a novel object detector based on interactive perception (ODIP), which can be adapted to novel domains in an automated manner. By interacting with a grasping system, ODIP a…
Phy-Tac: Toward Human-Like Grasping via Physics-Conditioned Tactile Goals
Department of Mechanical Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU)（香港理工大学机械工程系）；Research Institute for Smart Ageing (RISA), PolyU（PolyU智能老龄化研究所以）；Ningbo Institute of Digital Twin, Eastern Institute of Technology (EIT)（宁波数字孪生研究所，东部技术研究所）；Department of Mechanical and Energy Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学机械与能源工程系）
Grasping deformable objects is not well researched due to the complexity in modelling and simulating the dynamic behavior of such objects. However, with the rapid development of physics-based simulators that support soft bodies, the research gap between rigid and deformable objects is getting smaller. To leverage the capability of such simulators and to challenge the assumption that has guided robotic grasping research so far, i.e., object rigidity, we proposed a deep-learning based approach that generates stiffness-dependent grasps. Our network is trained on purely synthetic data generated fr…
