How To Make Sure Your Robot Doesn't Drop Your Wine Glass

From microelectronics to mechanics and machine learning, the modern-day robots are a marvel of multiple engineering disciplines. They use sensors, image processing and reinforcement learning algorithms to move the objects around and move around the obstacles as well. However, this is not the case when it comes to handling objects such as glass. The surface properties of glass are transparent, and non-uniform light reflection makes it difficult for the sensors mounted on the robot to understand how to engage in a simple pick and place operation. To address this problem, researchers at Google AI along with Synthesis AI and Columbia University devised a novel machine-learning algorithm called ClearGrasp, that is capable of estimating accurate 3D data of transparent objects from RGB-D images.