We present a novel approach to robotic grasp planning using both a learned grasp proposal network and a learned 3D shape reconstruction network. Our system generates 6-DOF grasps from a single RGB-D image of the target object, which is provided as input to both networks. By using the geometric reconstruction to refine the the candidate grasp produced by the grasp proposal network, our system is able to accurately grasp both known and unknown objects, even when the grasp location on the object is not visible in the input image.
This paper presents the network architectures, training procedures, and grasp refinement method that comprise our system. Experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our system at grasping both known and unknown objects (91% success rate in a physical robot environment, 84% success rate in a simulated environment). We additionally perform ablation studies that show the benefits of combining a learned grasp proposal with geometric reconstruction for grasping, and also show that our system outperforms several baselines in a grasping task.
The ability to adapt to uncertainties, recover from failures, and coordinate between hand and fingers are essential sensorimotor skills for fully autonomous robotic grasping. In this paper, we aim to study a unified feedback control policy for generating the finger actions and the motion of hand to accomplish seamlessly coordinated tasks of reaching, grasping and re-grasping. We proposed a set of quantified metrics for task-orientated rewards to guide the policy exploration, and we analyzed and demonstrated the effectiveness of each reward term. To acquire a robust re-grasping motion, we deplo…
Indian Institute of Information Technology Allahabad（阿拉哈巴德印度信息技术学院）
Intelligent robot grasping is a very challenging task due to its inherent complexity and non availability of sufficient labelled data. Since making suitable labelled data available for effective training for any deep learning based model including deep reinforcement learning is so crucial for successful grasp learning, in this paper we propose to solve the problem of generating grasping Poses/Rectangles using a Pix2Pix Generative Adversarial Network (Pix2Pix GAN), which takes an image of an object as input and produces the grasping rectangle tagged with the object as output. Here, we have prop…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；NVIDIA（英伟达）；University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校）
6D grasping in cluttered scenes is a longstanding problem in robotic manipulation. Open-loop manipulation pipelines may fail due to inaccurate state estimation, while most end-to-end grasping methods have not yet scaled to complex scenes with obstacles. In this work, we propose a new method for end-to-end learning of 6D grasping in cluttered scenes. Our hierarchical framework learns collision-free target-driven grasping based on partial point cloud observations. We learn an embedding space to encode expert grasping plans during training and a variational autoencoder to sample diverse grasping …
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Adaptation to various scene configurations and object properties, stability and dexterity in robotic grasping manipulation is far from explored. This work presents an origami-based shape morphing fingertip design to actively tackle the grasping stability and dexterity problems. The proposed fingertip utilizes origami as its skeleton providing degrees of freedom at desired positions and motor-driven four-bar-linkages as its transmission components to achieve a compact size of the fingertip. 3 morphing types that are commonly observed and essential in robotic grasping are studied and validated w…
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院机械工程系）；Department of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University（斯坦福大学机械工程系）
We consider the optimization of the vector of grasping forces that support a known generalized force acting on the grasped object---a rigid body or a mechanism. Working in the framework of finite-dimensional normed vector spaces and their dual spaces, the cost function to be minimized is assumed to be a norm on the space of grasping forces. We present an expression for the optimum which depends on the external force and the kinematics of the grasping system. Next, assuming that optimal grasping forces are applied using force control, and assuming that there is a bound on the norm of the admiss…
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利理工学院）；Università di Genova（热那亚大学）
The use of benchmarks is a widespread and scientifically meaningful practice to validate performance of different approaches to the same task. In the context of robot grasping the use of common object sets has emerged in recent years, however no dominant protocols and metrics to test grasping pipelines have taken root yet. In this paper, we present version 1.0 of GRASPA, a benchmark to test effectiveness of grasping pipelines on physical robot setups. This approach tackles the complexity of such pipelines by proposing different metrics that account for the features and limits of the test platf…
While grasps must satisfy the grasping stability criteria, good grasps depend on the specific manipulation scenario: the object, its properties and functionalities, as well as the task and grasp constraints. In this paper, we consider such information for robot grasping by leveraging manifolds and symbolic object parts. Specifically, we introduce a new probabilistic logic module to first semantically reason about pre-grasp configurations with respect to the intended tasks. Further, a mapping is learned from part-related visual features to good grasping points. The probabilistic logic module ma…
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）
This paper presents a real-time, object-independent grasp synthesis method which can be used for closed-loop grasping. Our proposed Generative Grasping Convolutional Neural Network (GG-CNN) predicts the quality and pose of grasps at every pixel. This one-to-one mapping from a depth image overcomes limitations of current deep-learning grasping techniques by avoiding discrete sampling of grasp candidates and long computation times. Additionally, our GG-CNN is orders of magnitude smaller while detecting stable grasps with equivalent performance to current state-of-the-art techniques. The light-we…
Microsoft（微软）；Tokyo Institute of Technology（东京工业大学）
A challenge in robot grasping is to achieve task-grasping which is to select a grasp that is advantageous to the success of tasks before and after grasps. One of the frameworks to address this difficulty is Learning-from-Observation (LfO), which obtains various hints from human demonstrations. This paper solves three issues in the grasping skills in the LfO framework: 1) how to functionally mimic human-demonstrated grasps to robots with limited grasp capability, 2) how to coordinate grasp skills with reaching body mimicking, 3) how to robustly perform grasps under object pose and shape uncerta…
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…
Autonomous robotic grasping plays an important role in intelligent robotics. However, how to help the robot grasp specific objects in object stacking scenes is still an open problem, because there are two main challenges for autonomous robots: (1)it is a comprehensive task to know what and how to grasp; (2)it is hard to deal with the situations in which the target is hidden or covered by other objects. In this paper, we propose a multi-task convolutional neural network for autonomous robotic grasping, which can help the robot find the target, make the plan for grasping and finally grasp the ta…
MG-Grasp: Metric-Scale Geometric 6-DoF Grasping Framework with Sparse RGB Observations
The Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China（清华大学电子工程系，北京100084，中国）；The Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China（香港科学与技术大学电子与计算机工程系，香港，中国）
Shape informs how an object should be grasped, both in terms of where and how. As such, this paper describes a segmentation-based architecture for decomposing objects sensed with a depth camera into multiple primitive shapes, along with a post-processing pipeline for robotic grasping. Segmentation employs a deep network, called PS-CNN, trained on synthetic data with 6 classes of primitive shapes and generated using a simulation engine. Each primitive shape is designed with parametrized grasp families, permitting the pipeline to identify multiple grasp candidates per shape region. The grasps ar…
Robotic Grasping has always been an active topic in robotics since grasping is one of the fundamental but most challenging skills of robots. It demands the coordination of robotic perception, planning, and control for robustness and intelligence. However, current solutions are still far behind humans, especially when confronting unstructured scenarios. In this paper, we survey the advances of robotic grasping, starting from the classical formulations and solutions to the modern ones. By reviewing the history of robotic grasping, we want to provide a complete view of this community, and perhaps…
This paper studies robustness in planar grasping from a geometric perspective. By treating grasping as a process that shapes the free-space of an object over time, we can define three types of certificates to guarantee success of a grasp: (a) invariance under an initial set, (b) convergence towards a goal grasp, and (c) observability over the final object pose. We develop convex-combinatorial models for each of these certificates, which can be expressed as simple semi-algebraic relations under mild-modeling assumptions. By leveraging these models to synthesize certificates, we optimize certifi…
Introducing Environmental Constraints to Grasping Strategies for Paper-Like Flexible Materials Using a Soft Gripper
College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Nanjing University（南京大学机械与电子工程学院）；Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Bionic Materials and Equipment, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（江苏生物材料与设备重点实验室，南京航空航天大学）
University of California, Merced（加州大学默塞德分校）；National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)（美国国家标准与技术研究院）
This technical report presents an introduction to different aspects of multi-fingered robot grasping. After having introduced relevant mathematical background for modeling, form and force closure are discussed. Next, we present an overview of various grasp planning algorithms with the objective of illustrating different approaches to solve this problem. Finally, we discuss grasp performance benchmarking.
Wuhan University（武汉大学）；University of Hamburg（汉堡大学）；Wuhan Institute of Technology（武汉工程大学）；The Chinese University of HongKong（香港中文大学）
Data-driven approaches have become a dominant paradigm for robotic grasp planning. However, the performance of these approaches is enormously influenced by the quality of the available training data. In this paper, we propose a framework to generate object shapes to improve the grasping dataset quality, thus enhancing the grasping ability of a pre-designed learning-based grasp planning network. In this framework, the object shapes are embedded into a low-dimensional feature space using an AutoEncoder (encoder-decoder) based structure network. The rarity and graspness scores are defined for eac…
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been proven to be a powerful paradigm for learning complex control policy autonomously. Numerous recent applications of DRL in robotic grasping have successfully trained DRL robotic agents end-to-end, mapping visual inputs into control instructions directly, but the amount of training data required may hinder these applications in practice. In this paper, we propose a DRL based robotic visual grasping framework, in which visual perception and control policy are trained separately rather than end-to-end. The visual perception produces physical descriptions …
SegGrasp: Zero-Shot Task-Oriented Grasping via Semantic and Geometric Guided Segmentation
Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院软件研究所）；University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；MEGVII Technology（旷视科技）；Waseda University（早稻田大学）
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）；LYRO Robotics（LYRO机器人公司）
We present the Evolved Grasping Analysis Dataset (EGAD), comprising over 2000 generated objects aimed at training and evaluating robotic visual grasp detection algorithms. The objects in EGAD are geometrically diverse, filling a space ranging from simple to complex shapes and from easy to difficult to grasp, compared to other datasets for robotic grasping, which may be limited in size or contain only a small number of object classes. Additionally, we specify a set of 49 diverse 3D-printable evaluation objects to encourage reproducible testing of robotic grasping systems across a range of compl…
The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；St. Vincent’s Hospital（圣文森特医院）
Tactile-based blind grasping addresses realistic robotic grasping in which the hand only has access to proprioceptive and tactile sensors. The robotic hand has no prior knowledge of the object/grasp properties, such as object weight, inertia, and shape. There exists no manipulation controller that rigorously guarantees object manipulation in such a setting. Here, a robust control law is proposed for object manipulation in tactile-based blind grasping. The analysis ensures semi-global asymptotic and exponential stability in the presence of model uncertainties and external disturbances that are …
In this work, we present a deep reinforcement learning based method to solve the problem of robotic grasping using visio-motor feedback. The use of a deep learning based approach reduces the complexity caused by the use of hand-designed features. Our method uses an off-policy reinforcement learning framework to learn the grasping policy. We use the double deep Q-learning framework along with a novel Grasp-Q-Network to output grasp probabilities used to learn grasps that maximize the pick success. We propose a visual servoing mechanism that uses a multi-view camera setup that observes the scene…
This paper proposes 12 multi-object grasps (MOGs) types from a human and robot grasping data set. The grasp types are then analyzed and organized into a MOG taxonomy. This paper first presents three MOG data collection setups: a human finger tracking setup for multi-object grasping demonstrations, a real system with Barretthand, UR5e arm, and a MOG algorithm, a simulation system with the same settings as the real system. Then the paper describes a novel stochastic grasping routine designed based on a biased random walk to explore the robotic hand's configuration space for feasible MOGs. Based …
UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Siemens Research Lab（西门子研究实验室）
While deep learning has enabled significant progress in designing general purpose robot grasping systems, there remain objects which still pose challenges for these systems. Recent work on Exploratory Grasping has formalized the problem of systematically exploring grasps on these adversarial objects and explored a multi-armed bandit model for identifying high-quality grasps on each object stable pose. However, these systems are still limited to exploring a small number or grasps on each object. We present Learned Efficient Grasp Sets (LEGS), an algorithm that efficiently explores thousands of …
The Grasp Reset Mechanism: An Automated Apparatus for Conducting Grasping Trials
Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CoRIS) Institute（协作机器人与智能系统研究所）；Oregon State University（俄勒冈州立大学）；Southwest Research Institute (SwRI)（西南研究院）；UMass Lowell Nerve Center（马萨诸塞大学洛厄尔分校神经中心）
This article presents a method for grasping novel objects by learning from experience. Successful attempts are remembered and then used to guide future grasps such that more reliable grasping is achieved over time. To generalise the learned experience to unseen objects, we introduce the dense geometric correspondence matching network (DGCM-Net). This applies metric learning to encode objects with similar geometry nearby in feature space. Retrieving relevant experience for an unseen object is thus a nearest neighbour search with the encoded feature maps. DGCM-Net also reconstructs 3D-3D corresp…
General robot grasping in clutter requires the ability to synthesize grasps that work for previously unseen objects and that are also robust to physical interactions, such as collisions with other objects in the scene. In this work, we design and train a network that predicts 6 DOF grasps from 3D scene information gathered from an on-board sensor such as a wrist-mounted depth camera. Our proposed Volumetric Grasping Network (VGN) accepts a Truncated Signed Distance Function (TSDF) representation of the scene and directly outputs the predicted grasp quality and the associated gripper orientatio…
GAMMA: Graspability-Aware Mobile MAnipulation Policy Learning based on Online Grasping Pose Fusion
CFCS, School of Computer Science, Peking University（北京大学计算机学院CFCS）；Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence（北京人工智能研究院）；Galbot Tongji University（同济大学Galbot）
Beyond Visual Grasping: Benchmarking Complex Grasping from Detection to Execution
University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Zurich University of Applied Science（苏黎世应用科学大学）；Indian Institute of Science（印度科学研究所）；University of Information Technology（信息技术大学）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）
Robotic grasping is one of the most fundamental robotic manipulation tasks and has been actively studied. However, how to quickly teach a robot to grasp a novel target object in clutter remains challenging. This paper attempts to tackle the challenge by leveraging object attributes that facilitate recognition, grasping, and quick adaptation. In this work, we introduce an end-to-end learning method of attribute-based robotic grasping with one-grasp adaptation capability. Our approach fuses the embeddings of a workspace image and a query text using a gated-attention mechanism and learns to predi…
Grasping a novel target object in constrained environments (e.g., walls, bins, and shelves) requires intensive reasoning about grasp pose reachability to avoid collisions with the surrounding structures. Typical 6-DoF robotic grasping systems rely on the prior knowledge about the environment and intensive planning computation, which is ungeneralizable and inefficient. In contrast, we propose a novel Collision-Aware Reachability Predictor (CARP) for 6-DoF grasping systems. The CARP learns to estimate the collision-free probabilities for grasp poses and significantly improves grasping in challen…
GraspFoM: Towards Reconstruction-Driven Robotic Grasping with 3D Foundation Priors
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；Peking University（北京大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
FunGrasp: Functional Grasping for Diverse Dexterous Hands
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
6D robotic grasping beyond top-down bin-picking scenarios is a challenging task. Previous solutions based on 6D grasp synthesis with robot motion planning usually operate in an open-loop setting, which are sensitive to grasp synthesis errors. In this work, we propose a new method for learning closed-loop control policies for 6D grasping. Our policy takes a segmented point cloud of an object from an egocentric camera as input, and outputs continuous 6D control actions of the robot gripper for grasping the object. We combine imitation learning and reinforcement learning and introduce a goal-auxi…
Automation and Control Institute (ACIN)（自动化与控制研究所）；TU Wien（维也纳工业大学）
Transparent objects are common in day-to-day life and hence find many applications that require robot grasping. Many solutions toward object grasping exist for non-transparent objects. However, due to the unique visual properties of transparent objects, standard 3D sensors produce noisy or distorted measurements. Modern approaches tackle this problem by either refining the noisy depth measurements or using some intermediate representation of the depth. Towards this, we study deep learning 6D pose estimation from RGB images only for transparent object grasping. To train and test the suitability…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Google（谷歌）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
6-DoF robotic grasping is a long-lasting but unsolved problem. Recent methods utilize strong 3D networks to extract geometric grasping representations from depth sensors, demonstrating superior accuracy on common objects but perform unsatisfactorily on photometrically challenging objects, e.g., objects in transparent or reflective materials. The bottleneck lies in that the surface of these objects can not reflect back accurate depth due to the absorption or refraction of light. In this paper, in contrast to exploiting the inaccurate depth data, we propose the first RGB-only 6-DoF grasping pipe…
A segmentation-based architecture is proposed to decompose objects into multiple primitive shapes from monocular depth input for robotic manipulation. The backbone deep network is trained on synthetic data with 6 classes of primitive shapes generated by a simulation engine. Each primitive shape is designed with parametrized grasp families, permitting the pipeline to identify multiple grasp candidates per shape primitive region. The grasps are priority ordered via proposed ranking algorithm, with the first feasible one chosen for execution. On task-free grasping of individual objects, the metho…
Australian Centre for Robotic Vision (ACRV)（澳大利亚机器人视觉中心）；Queensland University of Technology (QUT)（昆士兰科技大学）
This paper considers the final approach phase of visual-closed-loop grasping where the RGB-D camera is no longer able to provide valid depth information. Many current robotic grasping controllers are not closed-loop and therefore fail for moving objects. Closed-loop grasp controllers based on RGB-D imagery can track a moving object, but fail when the sensor's minimum object distance is violated just before grasping. To overcome this we propose the use of image-based visual servoing (IBVS) to guide the robot to the object-relative grasp pose using camera RGB information. IBVS robustly moves the…
GRASPLAT: Enabling dexterous grasping through novel view synthesis
TeV, Fondazione Bruno Kessler（TeV，布鲁诺·凯瑟尔基金会）；PAVIS, Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（PAVIS，意大利技术研究院基金会）；ISR, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa（ISR，里斯本大学理工学院）；University of Trento（特伦托大学）
