Skilled robotic manipulation benefits from complex synergies between non-prehensile (e.g. pushing) and prehensile (e.g. grasping) actions: pushing can help rearrange cluttered objects to make space for arms and fingers; likewise, grasping can help displace objects to make pushing movements more precise and collision-free. In this work, we demonstrate that it is possible to discover and learn these synergies from scratch through model-free deep reinforcement learning. Our method involves training two fully convolutional networks that map from visual observations to actions: one infers the utility of pushes for a dense pixel-wise sampling of end effector orientations and locations, while the other does the same for grasping. Both networks are trained jointly in a Q-learning framework and are entirely self-supervised by trial and error, where rewards are provided from successful grasps. In this way, our policy learns pushing motions that enable future grasps, while learning grasps that can leverage past pushes. During picking experiments in both simulation and real-world scenarios, we find that our system quickly learns complex behaviors amid challenging cases of clutter, and achieves better grasping success rates and picking efficiencies than baseline alternatives after only a few hours of training. We further demonstrate that our method is capable of generalizing to novel objects. Qualitative results (videos), code, pre-trained models, and simulation environments are available at this http URL
Grasping. Grasping too, has been well studied in the domain of model-based reasoning; from modeling contact forces and their resistance to external wrenches @cite_24 @cite_29 , to characterizing grasps by their ability to constrain object mobility @cite_13 . A common approach to deploying these methods in real systems involves pre-computing grasps from a database of known 3D object models @cite_38 , and indexing them at run-time with point cloud registration for object pose estimation @cite_23 @cite_7 . These methods, however, typically assume knowledge of object shapes, poses, dynamics, and contact points -- information which is rarely known for novel objects in unstructured environments.
@cite_38 @cite_7 @cite_29 @cite_24 @cite_23 @cite_13
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Collecting grasp data for learning and benchmarking purposes is very expensive. It would be helpful to have a standard database of graspable objects, along with a set of stable grasps for each object, but no such database exists. In this work we show how to automate the construction of a database consisting of several hands, thousands of objects, and hundreds of thousands of grasps. Using this database, we demonstrate a novel grasp planning algorithm that exploits geometric similarity between a 3D model and the objects in the database to synthesize form closure grasps. Our contributions are this algorithm, and the database itself, which we are releasing to the community as a tool for both grasp planning and benchmarking. Matching local geometric features on real-world depth images is a challenging task due to the noisy, low-resolution, and incomplete nature of 3D scan data. These difficulties limit the performance of current state-of-art methods, which are typically based on histograms over geometric properties. In this paper, we present 3DMatch, a data-driven model that learns a local volumetric patch descriptor for establishing correspondences between partial 3D data. To amass training data for our model, we propose a self-supervised feature learning method that leverages the millions of correspondence labels found in existing RGB-D reconstructions. Experiments show that our descriptor is not only able to match local geometry in new scenes for reconstruction, but also generalize to different tasks and spatial scales (e.g. instance-level object model alignment for the Amazon Picking Challenge, and mesh surface correspondence). Results show that 3DMatch consistently outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches by a significant margin. Code, data, benchmarks, and pre-trained models are available online at http: 3dmatch.cs.princeton.edu. 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. Robot warehouse automation has attracted significant interest in recent years, perhaps most visibly in the Amazon Picking Challenge (APC) [1]. A fully autonomous warehouse pick-and-place system requires robust vision that reliably recognizes and locates objects amid cluttered environments, self-occlusions, sensor noise, and a large variety of objects. In this paper we present an approach that leverages multiview RGB-D data and self-supervised, data-driven learning to overcome those difficulties. The approach was part of the MIT-Princeton Team system that took 3rd- and 4th-place in the stowing and picking tasks, respectively at APC 2016. In the proposed approach, we segment and label multiple views of a scene with a fully convolutional neural network, and then fit pre-scanned 3D object models to the resulting segmentation to get the 6D object pose. Training a deep neural network for segmentation typically requires a large amount of training data. We propose a self-supervised method to generate a large labeled dataset without tedious manual segmentation. We demonstrate that our system can reliably estimate the 6D pose of objects under a variety of scenarios. All code, data, and benchmarks are available at http: apc.cs.princeton.edu