Learning Motor Skills of Reactive Reaching and Grasping of Objects

Reactive grasping of objects is an essential capability of autonomous robot manipulation, which is yet challenging to learn such sensorimotor control to coordinate coherent hand-finger motions and be robust against disturbances and failures. This work proposed a deep reinforcement learning based scheme to train feedback control policies which can coordinate reaching and grasping actions in presence of uncertainties. We formulated geometric metrics and task-orientated quantities to design the reward, which enabled efficient exploration of grasping policies. Further, to improve the success rate, we deployed key initial states of difficult hand-finger poses to train policies to overcome potential failures due to challenging configurations. The extensive simulation validations and benchmarks demonstrated that the learned policy was robust to grasp both static and moving objects. Moreover, the policy generated successful failure recoveries within a short time in difficult configurations and was robust with synthetic noises in the state feedback which were unseen during training

Learning Motor Skills of Reactive Reaching and Grasping of Objects

Reactive grasping of objects is an essential capability of autonomous robot manipulation, which is yet challenging to learn such sensorimotor control to coordinate coherent hand-finger motions and be robust against disturbances and failures. This work proposed a deep reinforcement learning based scheme to train feedback control policies which can coordinate reaching and grasping actions in presence of uncertainties. We formulated geometric metrics and task-orientated quantities to design the reward, which enabled efficient exploration of grasping policies. Further, to improve the success rate, we deployed key initial states of difficult hand-finger poses to train policies to overcome potential failures due to challenging configurations. The extensive simulation validations and benchmarks demonstrated that the learned policy was robust to grasp both static and moving objects. Moreover, the policy generated successful failure recoveries within a short time in difficult configurations and was robust with synthetic noises in the state feedback which were unseen during training

Exploring Convolutional Networks for End-to-End Visual Servoing

Present image based visual servoing approaches rely on extracting hand crafted visual features from an image. Choosing the right set of features is important as it directly affects the performance of any approach. Motivated by recent breakthroughs in performance of data driven methods on recognition and localization tasks, we aim to learn visual feature representations suitable for servoing tasks in unstructured and unknown environments. In this paper, we present an end-to-end learning based approach for visual servoing in diverse scenes where the knowledge of camera parameters and scene geometry is not available a priori. This is achieved by training a convolutional neural network over color images with synchronised camera poses. Through experiments performed in simulation and on a quadrotor, we demonstrate the efficacy and robustness of our approach for a wide range of camera poses in both indoor as well as outdoor environments.Comment: IEEE ICRA 201

Antipodal Robotic Grasping using Deep Learning

In this work, we discuss two implementations that predict antipodal grasps for novel objects: A deep Q-learning approach and a Generative Residual Convolutional Neural Network approach. We present a deep reinforcement learning based method to solve the problem of robotic grasping using visio-motor feedback. The use of a deep learning based approach reduces the complexity caused by the use of hand-designed features. Our method uses an off-policy reinforcement learning framework to learn the grasping policy. We use the double deep Q-learning framework along with a novel Grasp-Q-Network to output grasp probabilities used to learn grasps that maximize the pick success. We propose a visual servoing mechanism that uses a multi-view camera setup that observes the scene which contains the objects of interest. We performed experiments using a Baxter Gazebo simulated environment as well as on the actual robot. The results show that our proposed method outperforms the baseline Q-learning framework and increases grasping accuracy by adapting a multi-view model in comparison to a single-view model. The second method tackles the problem of generating antipodal robotic grasps for unknown objects from an n-channel image of the scene. We propose a novel Generative Residual Convolutional Neural Network (GR-ConvNet) model that can generate robust antipodal grasps from n-channel input at real-time speeds (20ms). We evaluate the proposed model architecture on standard dataset and previously unseen household objects. We achieved state-of-the-art accuracy of 97.7% on Cornell grasp dataset. We also demonstrate a 93.5% grasp success rate on previously unseen real-world objects