Grasp Proposal Networks: An End-to-End Solution for Visual Learning of Robotic Grasps

Learning robotic grasps from visual observations is a promising yet challenging task. Recent research shows its great potential by preparing and learning from large-scale synthetic datasets. For the popular, 6 degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) grasp setting of parallel-jaw gripper, most of existing methods take the strategy of heuristically sampling grasp candidates and then evaluating them using learned scoring functions. This strategy is limited in terms of the conflict between sampling efficiency and coverage of optimal grasps. To this end, we propose in this work a novel, end-to-end \emph{Grasp Proposal Network (GPNet)}, to predict a diverse set of 6-DOF grasps for an unseen object observed from a single and unknown camera view.