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 Operating System (ROS).
Although the analytic approaches may allow a robot to reason about how to grasp a certain object by itself, the abstractions made in the analysis to make it tractable results in models that often are only applicable to simulations or carefully structured laboratory experiments @cite_25 . Due to the limitations of the knowledge-based and empirical approaches, machine learning as a solution to these tasks has been on the rise. Methods vary from observing how humans grasp an object and reducing the configuration space of the robot to find pre-grasp postures @cite_26 , learning potential grasp points from 2D images @cite_9 , learning via reinforcement and imitation learning @cite_15 , to learning graspable and non-graspable objects via 2D and 3D features @cite_23 . In our work, we ignore the problem of grasp generation and hard-code strategies that work well for the competition tasks and the mechanism sensorial capabilities of our hand.
@cite_26 @cite_9 @cite_23 @cite_15 @cite_25
2951159816 1899217968 2949098821 2201912979
We review the work on data-driven grasp synthesis and the methodologies for sampling and ranking candidate grasps. We divide the approaches into three groups based on whether they synthesize grasps for known, familiar or unknown objects. This structure allows us to identify common object representations and perceptual processes that facilitate the employed data-driven grasp synthesis technique. In the case of known objects, we concentrate on the approaches that are based on object recognition and pose estimation. In the case of familiar objects, the techniques use some form of a similarity matching to a set of previously encountered objects. Finally for the approaches dealing with unknown objects, the core part is the extraction of specific features that are indicative of good grasps. Our survey provides an overview of the different methodologies and discusses open problems in the area of robot grasping. We also draw a parallel to the classical approaches that rely on analytic formulations. We present a system for grasping unknown objects, even from piles or cluttered scenes, given a point cloud. Our method is based on the topography of a given scene and abstracts grasp-relevant structures to enable machine learning techniques for grasping tasks. We describe how Height Accumulated Features HAF and their extension, Symmetry Height Accumulated Features, extract grasp relevant local shapes. We investigate grasp quality using an F-score metric. We demonstrate the gain and the expressive power of HAF by comparing its trained classifier with one that resulted from training on simple height grids. An efficient way to calculate HAF is presented. We describe how the trained grasp classifier is used to explore the whole grasp space and introduce a heuristic to find the most robust grasp. We show how to use our approach to adapt the gripper opening width before grasping. In robotic experiments we demonstrate different aspects of our system on three robot platforms: a Schunk seven-degree-of-freedom arm, a PR2 and a Kuka LWR arm. We perform tasks to grasp single objects, autonomously unload a box and clear the table. Thereby we show that our approach is easily adaptable and robust with respect to different manipulators. As part of the experiments we compare our algorithm with a state-of-the-art method and show significant improvements. Concrete examples are used to illustrate the benefit of our approach compared with established grasp approaches. Finally, we show advantages of the symbiosis between our approach and object recognition. Current learning-based robot grasping approaches exploit human-labeled datasets for training the models. However, there are two problems with such a methodology: (a) since each object can be grasped in multiple ways, manually labeling grasp locations is not a trivial task; (b) human labeling is biased by semantics. While there have been attempts to train robots using trial-and-error experiments, the amount of data used in such experiments remains substantially low and hence makes the learner prone to over-fitting. In this paper, we take the leap of increasing the available training data to 40 times more than prior work, leading to a dataset size of 50K data points collected over 700 hours of robot grasping attempts. This allows us to train a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for the task of predicting grasp locations without severe overfitting. In our formulation, we recast the regression problem to an 18-way binary classification over image patches. We also present a multi-stage learning approach where a CNN trained in one stage is used to collect hard negatives in subsequent stages. Our experiments clearly show the benefit of using large-scale datasets (and multi-stage training) for the task of grasping. We also compare to several baselines and show state-of-the-art performance on generalization to unseen objects for grasping. Current model free learning-based robot grasping approaches exploit human-labeled datasets for training the models. However, there are two problems with such a methodology: (a) since each object can be grasped in multiple ways, manually labeling grasp locations is not a trivial task; (b) human labeling is biased by semantics. While there have been attempts to train robots using trial-and-error experiments, the amount of data used in such experiments remains substantially low and hence makes the learner prone to over-fitting. In this paper, we take the leap of increasing the available training data to 40 times more than prior work, leading to a dataset size of 50K data points collected over 700 hours of robot grasping attempts. This allows us to train a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for the task of predicting grasp locations without severe overfitting. In our formulation, we recast the regression problem to an 18-way binary classification over image patches. We also present a multi-stage learning approach where a CNN trained in one stage is used to collect hard negatives in subsequent stages. Our experiments clearly show the benefit of using large-scale datasets (and multi-stage training) for the task of grasping. We also compare to several baselines and show state-of-the-art performance on generalization to unseen objects for grasping.