A Single Multi-Task Deep Neural Network with a Multi-Scale Feature Aggregation Mechanism for Manipulation Relationship Reasoning in Robotic Grasping

Grasping specific objects in complex and irregularly stacked scenes is still challenging for robotics. Because the robot is not only required to identify the object's grasping posture but also needs to reason the manipulation relationship between the objects. In this paper, we propose a manipulation relationship reasoning network with a multi-scale feature aggregation (MSFA) mechanism for robot grasping tasks. MSFA aggregates high-level semantic information and low-level spatial information in a cross-scale connection way to improve the generalization ability of the model. Furthermore, to improve the accuracy, we propose to use intersection features with rich location priors for manipulation relationship reasoning. Experiments are validated in VMRD datasets and real environments, respectively. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can accurately predict the manipulation relationship between objects in the scene of multi-object stacking. Compared with previous methods, it significantly improves reasoning speed and accuracy

Learning Multi-step Robotic Manipulation Tasks through Visual Planning

Multi-step manipulation tasks in unstructured environments are extremely challenging for a robot to learn. Such tasks interlace high-level reasoning that consists of the expected states that can be attained to achieve an overall task and low-level reasoning that decides what actions will yield these states. A model-free deep reinforcement learning method is proposed to learn multi-step manipulation tasks. This work introduces a novel Generative Residual Convolutional Neural Network (GR-ConvNet) model that can generate robust antipodal grasps from n-channel image input at real-time speeds (20ms). The proposed model architecture achieved a state-of-the-art accuracy on three standard grasping datasets. The adaptability of the proposed approach is demonstrated by directly transferring the trained model to a 7 DoF robotic manipulator with a grasp success rate of 95.4% and 93.0% on novel household and adversarial objects, respectively. A novel Robotic Manipulation Network (RoManNet) is introduced, which is a vision-based model architecture, to learn the action-value functions and predict manipulation action candidates. A Task Progress based Gaussian (TPG) reward function is defined to compute the reward based on actions that lead to successful motion primitives and progress towards the overall task goal. To balance the ratio of exploration/exploitation, this research introduces a Loss Adjusted Exploration (LAE) policy that determines actions from the action candidates according to the Boltzmann distribution of loss estimates. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated by training RoManNet to learn several challenging multi-step robotic manipulation tasks in both simulation and real-world. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of success rate and action efficiency. The ablation studies show that TPG and LAE are especially beneficial for tasks like multiple block stacking

Domain Randomization and Generative Models for Robotic Grasping

Deep learning-based robotic grasping has made significant progress thanks to algorithmic improvements and increased data availability. However, state-of-the-art models are often trained on as few as hundreds or thousands of unique object instances, and as a result generalization can be a challenge. In this work, we explore a novel data generation pipeline for training a deep neural network to perform grasp planning that applies the idea of domain randomization to object synthesis. We generate millions of unique, unrealistic procedurally generated objects, and train a deep neural network to perform grasp planning on these objects. Since the distribution of successful grasps for a given object can be highly multimodal, we propose an autoregressive grasp planning model that maps sensor inputs of a scene to a probability distribution over possible grasps. This model allows us to sample grasps efficiently at test time (or avoid sampling entirely). We evaluate our model architecture and data generation pipeline in simulation and the real world. We find we can achieve a $>$90% success rate on previously unseen realistic objects at test time in simulation despite having only been trained on random objects. We also demonstrate an 80% success rate on real-world grasp attempts despite having only been trained on random simulated objects.Comment: 8 pages, 11 figures. Submitted to 2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2018

Modular Anti-noise Deep Learning Network for Robotic Grasp Detection Based on RGB Images

While traditional methods relies on depth sensors, the current trend leans towards utilizing cost-effective RGB images, despite their absence of depth cues. This paper introduces an interesting approach to detect grasping pose from a single RGB image. To this end, we propose a modular learning network augmented with grasp detection and semantic segmentation, tailored for robots equipped with parallel-plate grippers. Our network not only identifies graspable objects but also fuses prior grasp analyses with semantic segmentation, thereby boosting grasp detection precision. Significantly, our design exhibits resilience, adeptly handling blurred and noisy visuals. Key contributions encompass a trainable network for grasp detection from RGB images, a modular design facilitating feasible grasp implementation, and an architecture robust against common image distortions. We demonstrate the feasibility and accuracy of our proposed approach through practical experiments and evaluations

Instance-wise Grasp Synthesis for Robotic Grasping

Generating high-quality instance-wise grasp configurations provides critical information of how to grasp specific objects in a multi-object environment and is of high importance for robot manipulation tasks. This work proposed a novel \textbf{S}ingle-\textbf{S}tage \textbf{G}rasp (SSG) synthesis network, which performs high-quality instance-wise grasp synthesis in a single stage: instance mask and grasp configurations are generated for each object simultaneously. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art on robotic grasp prediction based on the OCID-Grasp dataset, and performs competitively on the JACQUARD dataset. The benchmarking results showed significant improvements compared to the baseline on the accuracy of generated grasp configurations. The performance of the proposed method has been validated through both extensive simulations and real robot experiments for three tasks including single object pick-and-place, grasp synthesis in cluttered environments and table cleaning task