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
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In this paper we focus on the concept of low-dimensional posture subspaces for artificial hands. We begin by discussing the applicability of a hand configuration subspace to the problem of automated grasp synthesis; our results show that low-dimensional optimization can be instrumental in deriving effective pre-grasp shapes for a number of complex robotic hands. We then show that the computational advantages of using a reduced dimensionality framework enable it to serve as an interface between the human and automated components of an interactive grasping system. We present an on-line grasp planner that allows a human operator to perform dexterous grasping tasks using an artificial hand. In order to achieve the computational rates required for effective user interaction, grasp planning is performed in a hand posture subspace of highly reduced dimensionality. The system also uses real-time input provided by the operator, further simplifying the search for stable grasps to the point where solutions can be found at interactive rates. We demonstrate our approach on a number of different hand models and target objects, in both real and virtual environments. We consider the problem of grasping novel objects, specifically objects that are being seen for the first time through vision. Grasping a previously unknown object, one for which a 3-d model is not available, is a challenging problem. Furthermore, even if given a model, one still has to decide where to grasp the object. We present a learning algorithm that neither requires nor tries to build a 3-d model of the object. Given two (or more) images of an object, our algorithm attempts to identify a few points in each image corresponding to good locations at which to grasp the object. This sparse set of points is then triangulated to obtain a 3-d location at which to attempt a grasp. This is in contrast to standard dense stereo, which tries to triangulate every single point in an image (and often fails to return a good 3-d model). Our algorithm for identifying grasp locations from an image is trained by means of supervised learning, using synthetic images for the training set. We demonstrate this approach on two robotic manipulation platforms. Our algorithm successfully grasps a wide variety of objects, such as plates, tape rolls, jugs, cellphones, keys, screwdrivers, staplers, a thick coil of wire, a strangely shaped power horn and others, none of which were seen in the training set. We also apply our method to the task of unloading items from dishwashers. We consider the task of grasping novel objects and cleaning fairly cluttered tables with many novel objects. Recent successful approaches employ machine learning algorithms to identify points on the scene that the robot should grasp. In this paper, we show that the task can be significantly simplified by using segmentation, especially with depth information. A supervised localization method is employed to select graspable segments. We also propose a shape completion and grasp planner method which takes partial 3D information and plans the most stable grasping strategy. Extensive experiments on our robot demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Grasping an object is a task that inherently needs to be treated in a hybrid fashion. The system must decide both where and how to grasp the object. While selecting where to grasp requires learning about the object as a whole, the execution only needs to reactively adapt to the context close to the grasp's location. We propose a hierarchical controller that reflects the structure of these two sub-problems, and attempts to learn solutions that work for both. A hybrid architecture is employed by the controller to make use of various machine learning methods that can cope with the large amount of uncertainty inherent to the task. The controller's upper level selects where to grasp the object using a reinforcement learner, while the lower level comprises an imitation learner and a vision-based reactive controller to determine appropriate grasping motions. The resulting system is able to quickly learn good grasps of a novel object in an unstructured environment, by executing smooth reaching motions and preshaping the hand depending on the object's geometry. The system was evaluated both in simulation and on a real robot. Grasp quality metrics which analyze the contact wrench space are commonly used to synthesize and analyze preplanned grasps. Preplanned grasping approaches rely on the robustness of stored solutions. Analyzing the robustness of such solutions for large databases of preplanned grasps is a limiting factor for the applicability of data driven approaches to grasping. In this work, we will focus on the stability of the widely used grasp wrench space epsilon quality metric over a large range of poses in simulation. We examine a large number of grasps from the Columbia Grasp Database for the Barrett hand. We find that in most cases the grasp with the most robust force closure with respect to pose error for a particular object is not the grasp with the highest epsilon quality. We demonstrate that grasps can be reranked by an estimate of the stability of their epsilon quality. We find that the grasps ranked best by this method are successful more often in physical experiments than grasps ranked best by the epsilon quality.