We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of RF-Grasp, a robotic system that can grasp fully-occluded objects in unknown and unstructured environments. Unlike prior systems that are constrained by the line-of-sight perception of vision and infrared sensors, RF-Grasp employs RF (Radio Frequency) perception to identify and locate target objects through occlusions, and perform efficient exploration and complex manipulation tasks in non-line-of-sight settings.
RF-Grasp relies on an eye-in-hand camera and batteryless RFID tags attached to objects of interest. It introduces two main innovations: (1) an RF-visual servoing controller that uses the RFID's location to selectively explore the environment and plan an efficient trajectory toward an occluded target, and (2) an RF-visual deep reinforcement learning network that can learn and execute efficient, complex policies for decluttering and grasping.
We implemented and evaluated an end-to-end physical prototype of RF-Grasp. We demonstrate it improves success rate and efficiency by up to 40-50% over a state-of-the-art baseline. We also demonstrate RF-Grasp in novel tasks such mechanical search of fully-occluded objects behind obstacles, opening up new possibilities for robotic manipulation. Qualitative results (videos) available at rfgrasp.media.mit.edu
In order to fully function in human environments, robot perception will need to account for the uncertainty caused by translucent materials. Translucency poses several open challenges in the form of transparent objects (e.g., drinking glasses), refractive media (e.g., water), and diffuse partial occlusions (e.g., objects behind stained glass panels). This paper presents Plenoptic Monte Carlo Localization (PMCL) as a method for localizing object poses in the presence of translucency using plenoptic (light-field) observations. We propose a new depth descriptor, the Depth Likelihood Volume (DLV),…
Field robotic harvesting is a promising technique in recent development of agricultural industry. It is vital for robots to recognise and localise fruits before the harvesting in natural orchards. However, the workspace of harvesting robots in orchards is complex: many fruits are occluded by branches and leaves. It is important to estimate a proper grasping pose for each fruit before performing the manipulation. In this study, a geometry-aware network, A3N, is proposed to perform end-to-end instance segmentation and grasping estimation using both color and geometry sensory data from a RGB-D ca…
GraspView: Active Perception Scoring and Best-View Optimization for Robotic Grasping in Cluttered Environments
Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（深圳先进技术研究院）；Shenzhen Graduate School, Peking University（深圳研究生院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学计算机科学与工程学院）；X-Era AI Lab（X-Era AI实验室）
Tactile perception is an essential ability of intelligent robots in interaction with their surrounding environments. This perception as an intermediate level acts between sensation and action and has to be defined properly to generate suitable action in response to sensed data. In this paper, we propose a feedback approach to address robot grasping task using force-torque tactile sensing. While visual perception is an essential part for gross reaching, constant utilization of this sensing modality can negatively affect the grasping process with overwhelming computation. In such case, human bei…
GraspClutter6D: A Large-scale Real-world Dataset for Robust Perception and Grasping in Cluttered Scenes
Korea Institute of Machinery & Materials (KIMM)（韩国机械材料研究院）；Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST)（全州科学技术院）；Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）
Embodied Perception for Test-time Grasping Detection Adaptation with Knowledge Infusion
School of Control Science and Engineering, Shandong University（山东大学控制科学与工程学院）；Unmanned Systems Technology Research Institute, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学无人系统技术研究院）
CLASP: Closed-loop Asynchronous Spatial Perception for Open-vocabulary Desktop Object Grasping
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；National Key Laboratory of Smart Farm Technologies and Systems（智慧农场技术与系统全国重点实验室）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Northeastern University（东北大学）
The sense of touch plays a key role in enabling humans to understand and interact with surrounding environments. For robots, tactile sensing is also irreplaceable. While interacting with objects, tactile sensing provides useful information for the robot to understand the object, such as distributed pressure, temperature, vibrations and texture. During robot grasping, vision is often occluded by its end-effectors, whereas tactile sensing can measure areas that are not accessible by vision. In the past decades, a number of tactile sensors have been developed for robots and used for different rob…
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 …
Developing personal robots that can perform a diverse range of manipulation tasks in unstructured environments necessitates solving several challenges for robotic grasping systems. We take a step towards this broader goal by presenting the first RL-based system, to our knowledge, for a mobile manipulator that can (a) achieve targeted grasping generalizing to unseen target objects, (b) learn complex grasping strategies for cluttered scenes with occluded objects, and (c) perform active vision through its movable wrist camera to better locate objects. The system is informed of the desired target …
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…
This work provides an architecture to enable robotic grasp planning via shape completion. Shape completion is accomplished through the use of a 3D convolutional neural network (CNN). The network is trained on our own new open source dataset of over 440,000 3D exemplars captured from varying viewpoints. At runtime, a 2.5D pointcloud captured from a single point of view is fed into the CNN, which fills in the occluded regions of the scene, allowing grasps to be planned and executed on the completed object. Runtime shape completion is very rapid because most of the computational costs of shape co…
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Toyota Research Institute（丰田研究院）
Cables are commonplace in homes, hospitals, and industrial warehouses and are prone to tangling. This paper extends prior work on autonomously untangling long cables by introducing novel uncertainty quantification metrics and actions that interact with the cable to reduce perception uncertainty. We present Sliding and Grasping for Tangle Manipulation 2.0 (SGTM 2.0), a system that autonomously untangles cables approximately 3 meters in length with a bilateral robot using estimates of uncertainty at each step to inform actions. By interactively reducing uncertainty, Sliding and Grasping for Tang…
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…
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…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Lehigh University（理海大学）
High-resolution representations are important for vision-based robotic grasping problems. Existing works generally encode the input images into low-resolution representations via sub-networks and then recover high-resolution representations. This will lose spatial information, and errors introduced by the decoder will be more serious when multiple types of objects are considered or objects are far away from the camera. To address these issues, we revisit the design paradigm of CNN for robotic perception tasks. We demonstrate that using parallel branches as opposed to serial stacked convolution…
We describe the grasping and manipulation strategy that we employed at the autonomous track of the Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Competition at IROS 2016. A salient feature of our architecture is the tight coupling between visual (Asus Xtion) and tactile perception (Robotic Materials), to reduce the uncertainty in sensing and actuation. We demonstrate the importance of tactile sensing and reactive control during the final stages of grasping using a Kinova Robotic arm. The set of tools and algorithms for object grasping presented here have been integrated into the open-source Robot Operatin…
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…
ROG-Grasp: Root-Oriented Geometry for Robotic Grasping and Placement
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Drexel University（德雷塞尔大学电气与计算机工程系）；Virginia Seafood Agricultural Research and Extension Center, and Department of Biological Systems Engineering, Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工学院生物系统工程系和弗吉尼亚海鲜农业研究与推广中心）；Amazon Store Foundation AI (SFAI)（亚马逊商店基金会人工智能（SFAI））
Benchmarking the Effects of Object Pose Estimation and Reconstruction on Robotic Grasping Success
Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague（捷克技术大学布拉格电子工程系）；Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics（捷克信息学、机器人学与自动化研究所）
Active Cross-Modal Visuo-Tactile Perception of Deformable Linear Objects
Dipartimento di Ingegneria, Università degli Studi della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli（工程学院，坎帕尼亚路易吉·范维蒂利大学）；Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione, Università degli Studi di Padova（信息工程学院，帕多瓦大学）
VILAS: A VLA-Integrated Low-cost Architecture with Soft Grasping for Robotic Manipulation
Drexel University（德雷塞尔大学）；Virginia Seafood Agricultural Research and Extension Center（弗吉尼亚海鲜农业研究与推广中心）；Amazon Store Foundation AI (SFAI)（亚马逊商店基金会人工智能（SFAI））
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）
Clothes Grasping and Unfolding Based on RGB-D Semantic Segmentation
School of Artificial Intelligence, Jilin University（吉林大学人工智能学院）；University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）；Engineering Research Center of Knowledge-Driven Human-Machine Intelligence, Ministry of Education, China（教育部知识驱动人机智能工程研究中心）
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）
