Reasoning about object grasp affordances allows an autonomous agent to estimate the most suitable grasp to execute a task. While current approaches for estimating grasp affordances are effective, their prediction is driven by hypotheses on visual features rather than an indicator of a proposal's suitability for an affordance task. Consequently, these works cannot guarantee any level of performance when executing a task and, in fact, not even ensure successful task completion. In this work, we present a pipeline for SAGAT based on prior experiences. We visually detect a grasp affordance region to extract multiple grasp affordance configuration candidates. Using these candidates, we forward simulate the outcome of executing the affordance task to analyse the relation between task outcome and grasp candidates. The relations are ranked by performance success with a heuristic confidence function and used to build a library of affordance task experiences. The library is later queried to perform one-shot transfer estimation of the best grasp configuration on new objects. Experimental evaluation shows that our method exhibits a significant performance improvement up to 11.7% against current state-of-the-art methods on grasp affordance detection. Experiments on a PR2 robotic platform demonstrate our method's highly reliable deployability to deal with real-world task affordance problems.
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Heriot-Watt University（赫瑞-瓦特大学）
Reasoning about object affordances allows an autonomous agent to perform generalised manipulation tasks among object instances. While current approaches to grasp affordance estimation are effective, they are limited to a single hypothesis. We present an approach for detection and extraction of multiple grasp affordances on an object via visual input. We define semantics as a combination of multiple attributes, which yields benefits in terms of generalisation for grasp affordance prediction. We use Markov Logic Networks to build a knowledge base graph representation to obtain a probability dist…
Universität Hamburg（汉堡大学）；Agile Robots AG（敏捷机器人公司）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Currently, task-oriented grasp detection approaches are mostly based on pixel-level affordance detection and semantic segmentation. These pixel-level approaches heavily rely on the accuracy of a 2D affordance mask, and the generated grasp candidates are restricted to a small workspace. To mitigate these limitations, we first construct a novel affordance-based grasp dataset and propose a 6-DoF task-oriented grasp detection framework, which takes the observed object point cloud as input and predicts diverse 6-DoF grasp poses for different tasks. Specifically, our implicit estimation network and …
Perception-for-grasping is a challenging problem in robotics. Inexpensive range sensors such as the Microsoft Kinect provide sensing capabilities that have given new life to the effort of developing robust and accurate perception methods for robot grasping. This paper proposes a new approach to localizing enveloping grasp affordances in 3-D point clouds efficiently. The approach is based on modeling enveloping grasp affordances as a cylindrical shells that corresponds to the geometry of the robot hand. A fast and accurate fitting method for quadratic surfaces is the core of our approach. An ev…
AffordDexGrasp: Open-set Language-guided Dexterous Grasp with Generalizable-Instructive Affordance
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, China（中山大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Key Laboratory of Machine Intelligence and Advanced Computing, Ministry of Education, China（教育部人工智能与高级计算重点实验室）
IEETA - University of Aveiro（阿威罗大学电子与电信研究所）；University of Groningen（格罗宁根大学）
Service robots are expected to autonomously and efficiently work in human-centric environments. For this type of robots, object perception and manipulation are challenging tasks due to need for accurate and real-time response. This paper presents an interactive open-ended learning approach to recognize multiple objects and their grasp affordances concurrently. This is an important contribution in the field of service robots since no matter how extensive the training data used for batch learning, a robot might always be confronted with an unknown object when operating in human-centric environme…
Affordance-Guided Enveloping Grasp Demonstration Toward Non-destructive Disassembly of Pinch-Infeasible Mating Parts
Department of Systems Innovation, Graduate School of Engineering Science, The University of Osaka（大阪大学工学研究院系统创新部门）；Industrial Cyber-physical Systems Research Center, The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)（国家先进工业科学与技术研究院工业网络物理系统研究中心）
Artificial intelligence is essential to succeed in challenging activities that involve dynamic environments, such as object manipulation tasks in indoor scenes. Most of the state-of-the-art literature explores robotic grasping methods by focusing exclusively on attributes of the target object. When it comes to human perceptual learning approaches, these physical qualities are not only inferred from the object, but also from the characteristics of the surroundings. This work proposes a method that includes environmental context to reason on an object affordance to then deduce its grasping regio…
Self-supervised grasp learning, i.e., learning to grasp by trial and error, has made great progress. However, it is still time-consuming to train such a model and also a challenge to apply it in practice. This work presents an accelerating method of robotic grasp learning via pretraining with coarse affordance maps of objects to be grasped based on a quite small dataset. A model generated through pre-training is harnessed as an initialization policy to warmly start grasp learning so as to guide a robot to capture more effective rewards at the beginning of training. An object in its coarse affo…
Institute of Knowledge Based Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学知识工程研究所）
In this paper we study grasp problem in dense cluster, a challenging task in warehouse logistics scenario. By introducing a two-step robust suction affordance detection method, we focus on using vacuum suction pad to clear up a box filled with seen and unseen objects. Two CNN based neural networks are proposed. A Fast Region Estimation Network (FRE-Net) predicts which region contains pickable objects, and a Suction Grasp Point Affordance network (SGPA-Net) determines which point in that region is pickable. So as to enable such two networks, we design a self-supervised learning pipeline to accu…
AffordGrasp: In-Context Affordance Reasoning for Open-Vocabulary Task-Oriented Grasping in Clutter
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence（北京人工智能研究院）；Peking University（北京大学）
DORA: Object Affordance-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Dexterous Robotic Manipulation
TAMS (Technical Aspects of Multimodal Systems), Department of Informatics, Universität Hamburg（技术多模态系统（TAMS），信息学院，汉堡大学）；Agile Robots AG（敏捷机器人公司）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑技术大学）
A key challenge in robot teaching is grasp-type recognition with a single RGB image and a target object name. Here, we propose a simple yet effective pipeline to enhance learning-based recognition by leveraging a prior distribution of grasp types for each object. In the pipeline, a convolutional neural network (CNN) recognizes the grasp type from an RGB image. The recognition result is further corrected using the prior distribution (i.e., affordance), which is associated with the target object name. Experimental results showed that the proposed method outperforms both a CNN-only and an afforda…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；SenseTime Group Limited（商汤集团有限公司）
Data-driven approach for grasping shows significant advance recently. But these approaches usually require much training data. To increase the efficiency of grasping data collection, this paper presents a novel grasp training system including the whole pipeline from data collection to model inference. The system can collect effective grasp sample with a corrective strategy assisted by antipodal grasp rule, and we design an affordance interpreter network to predict pixelwise grasp affordance map. We define graspability, ungraspability and background as grasp affordances. The key advantage of ou…
School of CS & AI, Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学计算机科学与人工智能学院）
Conventional works that learn grasping affordance from demonstrations need to explicitly predict grasping configurations, such as gripper approaching angles or grasping preshapes. Classic motion planners could then sample trajectories by using such predicted configurations. In this work, our goal is instead to fill the gap between affordance discovery and affordance-based policy learning by integrating the two objectives in an end-to-end imitation learning framework based on deep neural networks. From a psychological perspective, there is a close association between attention and affordance. T…
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）
Dexterous robotic hands are appealing for their agility and human-like morphology, yet their high degree of freedom makes learning to manipulate challenging. We introduce an approach for learning dexterous grasping. Our key idea is to embed an object-centric visual affordance model within a deep reinforcement learning loop to learn grasping policies that favor the same object regions favored by people. Unlike traditional approaches that learn from human demonstration trajectories (e.g., hand joint sequences captured with a glove), the proposed prior is object-centric and image-based, allowing …
ScaleADFG: Affordance-based Dexterous Functional Grasping via Scalable Dataset
State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（多模态人工智能系统国家重点实验室，自动化研究所，中国科学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；CasiaHand Robotics Co., Ltd（CasiaHand机器人有限公司）；SenseTime Research, SenseTime（商汤研究，商汤）；Idiap Research Institute（Idiap研究所）
Multi-Keypoint Affordance Representation for Functional Dexterous Grasping
School of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hunan University（人工智能与机器人学院，湖南大学）；College of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, Hunan University（计算机科学与电子工程学院，湖南大学）；National Engineering Research Center of Robot Visual Perception and Control Technology, Hunan University（机器人视觉感知与控制技术国家工程研究中心，湖南大学）
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
Grasp detection in clutter requires the robot to reason about the 3D scene from incomplete and noisy perception. In this work, we draw insight that 3D reconstruction and grasp learning are two intimately connected tasks, both of which require a fine-grained understanding of local geometry details. We thus propose to utilize the synergies between grasp affordance and 3D reconstruction through multi-task learning of a shared representation. Our model takes advantage of deep implicit functions, a continuous and memory-efficient representation, to enable differentiable training of both tasks. We t…
While many quality metrics exist to evaluate the quality of a grasp by itself, no clear quantification of the quality of a grasp relatively to the task the grasp is used for has been defined yet. In this paper we propose a framework to extend the concept of grasp quality metric to task-oriented grasping by defining affordance functions via basic grasp metrics for an open set of task affordances. We evaluate both the effectivity of the proposed task oriented metrics and their practical applicability by learning to infer them from vision. Indeed, we assess the validity of our novel framework bot…
AffordGrasp: Cross-Modal Diffusion for Affordance-Aware Grasp Synthesis
ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Shanghai Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Vision and Imaging（上海智能视觉与成像工程技术研究中心）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
This paper introduces a challenging object grasping task and proposes a self-supervised learning approach. The goal of the task is to grasp an object which is not feasible with a single parallel gripper, but only with harnessing environment fixtures (e.g., walls, furniture, heavy objects). This Slide-to-Wall grasping task assumes no prior knowledge except the partial observation of a target object. Hence the robot should learn an effective policy given a scene observation that may include the target object, environmental fixtures, and any other disturbing objects. We formulate the problem as v…
PreAfford: Universal Affordance-Based Pre-Grasping for Diverse Objects and Environments
Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University（清华大学人工智能产业研究院（AIR））；Xingjian College, Tsinghua University（清华大学行健书院）；CFCS, School of Computer Science, Peking University（北京大学计算机学院CFCS）；Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Peking University（北京大学人工智能研究院）；College of Control Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University（浙江大学控制科学与工程学院）；School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University（清华大学车辆与运载学院）
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…
Purdue University（普渡大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
Cloth in the real world is often crumpled, self-occluded, or folded in on itself such that key regions, such as corners, are not directly graspable, making manipulation difficult. We propose a system that leverages visual and tactile perception to unfold the cloth via grasping and sliding on edges. By doing so, the robot is able to grasp two adjacent corners, enabling subsequent manipulation tasks like folding or hanging. As components of this system, we develop tactile perception networks that classify whether an edge is grasped and estimate the pose of the edge. We use the edge classificatio…
Learning Granularity-Aware Affordances from Human-Object Interaction for Tool-Based Functional Dexterous Grasping
School of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hunan University（人工智能与机器人学院，湖南大学）；National Engineering Research Center of Robot Visual Perception and Control Technology, Hunan University（机器人视觉感知与控制技术国家工程研究中心，湖南大学）
University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；Technical University of Berlin（柏林工业大学）
Motion prediction in unstructured environments is a difficult problem and is essential for safe and efficient human-robot space sharing and collaboration. In this work, we focus on manipulation movements in environments such as homes, workplaces or restaurants, where the overall task and environment can be leveraged to produce accurate motion prediction. For these cases we propose an algorithmic framework that accounts explicitly for the environment geometry based on a model of affordances and a model of short-term human dynamics both trained on motion capture data. We propose dedicated functi…
Dexterous manipulation with a multi-finger hand is one of the most challenging problems in robotics. While recent progress in imitation learning has largely improved the sample efficiency compared to Reinforcement Learning, the learned policy can hardly generalize to manipulate novel objects, given limited expert demonstrations. In this paper, we propose to learn dexterous manipulation using large-scale demonstrations with diverse 3D objects in a category, which are generated from a human grasp affordance model. This generalizes the policy to novel object instances within the same category. To…
Learning 6-DoF Fine-grained Grasp Detection Based on Part Affordance Grounding
Center for X-Mechanics, School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Zhejiang University（浙江大学航空航天学院X力学中心）；Information Hub, Data Science and Analytics Thrust, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州）信息中心、数据科学与分析方向）；Advanced Manufacturing Lab, Huawei Technologies（华为技术先进制造实验室）；Research Institute, UBTECH Robotics Inc.（UBTECH机器人研究院）；School of Information and School of Smart Governance, Renmin University of China（中国人民大学信息学院和智能治理学院）；School of Engineering, Westlake University and the Institute of Advanced Technology, Westlake Institute for Advanced Study（西湖大学工程学院和西湖先进科技研究院）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Dalhousie University（达尔豪斯大学电气与计算机工程系）
Task-Aware Bimanual Affordance Prediction via VLM-Guided Semantic-Geometric Reasoning
Department of Computer Science, Technical University of Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学计算机科学系）；German Research Center for AI (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心）；Centre for Cognitive Science, Technical University of Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学认知科学中心）；Hessian Center for Artificial Intelligence (Hessian.AI), Darmstadt（黑森州人工智能中心）；Robotics Institute Germany (RIG)（德国机器人研究所）
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Shenzhen Academy of Robotics（深圳机器人研究院）
In this paper, a novel robotic grasping system is established to automatically pick up objects in cluttered scenes. A composite robotic hand composed of a suction cup and a gripper is designed for grasping the object stably. The suction cup is used for lifting the object from the clutter first and the gripper for grasping the object accordingly. We utilize the affordance map to provide pixel-wise lifting point candidates for the suction cup. To obtain a good affordance map, the active exploration mechanism is introduced to the system. An effective metric is designed to calculate the reward for…
Robotic grasping traditionally relies on object features or shape information for learning new or applying already learned grasps. We argue however that such a strong reliance on object geometric information renders grasping and grasp learning a difficult task in the event of cluttered environments with high uncertainty where reasonable object models are not available. This being so, in this paper we thus investigate the application of model-free stochastic optimization for grasp learning. For this, our proposed learning method requires just a handful of user-demonstrated grasps and an initial…
TD-TOG Dataset: Benchmarking Zero-Shot and One-Shot Task-Oriented Grasping for Object Generalization
University of Aberdeen（阿伯丁大学）；Bank of Valletta（瓦莱塔银行）；Universite Claude Bernard Lyon 1（里昂第一大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；École Centrale de Lyon（里昂中央理工学院）；INSA Lyon（里昂国立应用科学学院）；Université Lumière Lyon 2（里昂第二大学）；Technical University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt（维尔茨堡-施韦因富特应用技术大学）
Nowadays service robots are leaving the structured and completely known environments and entering human-centric settings. For these robots, object perception and grasping are two challenging tasks due to the high demand for accurate and real-time responses. Although many problems have already been understood and solved successfully, many challenges still remain. Open-ended learning is one of these challenges waiting for many improvements. Cognitive science revealed that humans learn to recognize object categories and grasp affordances ceaselessly over time. This ability allows adapting to new …
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…
