Recent research shows its great potential by preparing and learning from large-scale synthetic datasets.

Grasping has been a crucial but challenging problem in robotics for many years. One of the most important challenges is how to make grasping generalizable and robust to novel objects as well as grippers in unstructured environments. We present \regnet, a robotic grasping system that can adapt to different parallel jaws to grasp diversified objects. To support different grippers, \regnet embeds the gripper parameters into point clouds, based on which it predicts suitable grasp configurations. It includes three components: Score Network (SN), Grasp Region Network (GRN), and Refine Network (RN). In the first stage, SN is used to filter suitable points for grasping by grasp confidence scores. In the second stage, based on the selected points, GRN generates a set of grasp proposals. Finally, RN refines the grasp proposals for more accurate and robust predictions. We devise an analytic policy to choose the optimal grasp to be executed from the predicted grasp set. To train \regnet, we construct a large-scale grasp dataset containing collision-free grasp configurations using different parallel-jaw grippers. The experimental results demonstrate that \regnet with the analytic policy achieves the highest success rate of $74.98\%$ in real-world clutter scenes with $20$ objects, significantly outperforming several state-of-the-art methods, including GPD, PointNetGPD, and S4G. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/zhaobinglei/REGNet-V2.

Many robotic applications require to grasp objects not arbitrarily but at a very specific object part. This is especially important for manipulation tasks beyond simple pick-and-place scenarios or in robot-human interactions, such as object handovers. We propose AnyPart, a practical system that combines open-vocabulary object detection, open-vocabulary part segmentation and 6DOF grasp pose prediction to infer a grasp pose on a specific part of an object in 800 milliseconds. We contribute two new datasets for the task of open-vocabulary part-based grasping, a hand-segmented dataset containing 1014 object-part segmentations, and a dataset of real-world scenarios gathered during our robot trials for individual objects and table-clearing tasks. We evaluate AnyPart on a mobile manipulator robot using a set of 28 common household objects over 360 grasping trials. AnyPart is capable of producing successful grasps 69.52 %, when ignoring robot-based grasp failures, AnyPart predicts a grasp location on the correct part 88.57 % of the time.

We consider the problem of closed-loop robotic grasping and present a novel planner which uses Visual Feedback and an uncertainty-aware Adaptive Sampling strategy (VFAS) to close the loop. At each iteration, our method VFAS-Grasp builds a set of candidate grasps by generating random perturbations of a seed grasp. The candidates are then scored using a novel metric which combines a learned grasp-quality estimator, the uncertainty in the estimate and the distance from the seed proposal to promote temporal consistency. Additionally, we present two mechanisms to improve the efficiency of our sampling strategy: We dynamically scale the sampling region size and number of samples in it based on past grasp scores. We also leverage a motion vector field estimator to shift the center of our sampling region. We demonstrate that our algorithm can run in real time (20 Hz) and is capable of improving grasp performance for static scenes by refining the initial grasp proposal. We also show that it can enable grasping of slow moving objects, such as those encountered during human to robot handover.

We present the Grasp Proposal Network (GP-net), a Convolutional Neural Network model which can generate 6-DoF grasps from flexible viewpoints, e.g. as experienced by mobile manipulators. To train GP-net, we synthetically generate a dataset containing depth-images and ground-truth grasp information. In real-world experiments, we use the EGAD evaluation benchmark to evaluate GP-net against two commonly used algorithms, the Volumetric Grasping Network (VGN) and the Grasp Pose Detection package (GPD), on a PAL TIAGo mobile manipulator. In contrast to the state-of-the-art methods in robotic grasping, GP-net can be used for grasping objects from flexible, unknown viewpoints without the need to define the workspace and achieves a grasp success of 54.4% compared to 51.6% for VGN and 44.2% for GPD. We provide a ROS package along with our code and pre-trained models at https://aucoroboticsmu.github.io/GP-net/.

In this work, we tackle the problem of learning universal robotic dexterous grasping from a point cloud observation under a table-top setting. The goal is to grasp and lift up objects in high-quality and diverse ways and generalize across hundreds of categories and even the unseen. Inspired by successful pipelines used in parallel gripper grasping, we split the task into two stages: 1) grasp proposal (pose) generation and 2) goal-conditioned grasp execution. For the first stage, we propose a novel probabilistic model of grasp pose conditioned on the point cloud observation that factorizes rotation from translation and articulation. Trained on our synthesized large-scale dexterous grasp dataset, this model enables us to sample diverse and high-quality dexterous grasp poses for the object point cloud.For the second stage, we propose to replace the motion planning used in parallel gripper grasping with a goal-conditioned grasp policy, due to the complexity involved in dexterous grasping execution. Note that it is very challenging to learn this highly generalizable grasp policy that only takes realistic inputs without oracle states. We thus propose several important innovations, including state canonicalization, object curriculum, and teacher-student distillation. Integrating the two stages, our final pipeline becomes the first to achieve universal generalization for dexterous grasping, demonstrating an average success rate of more than 60\% on thousands of object instances, which significantly outperforms all baselines, meanwhile showing only a minimal generalization gap.

Deep learning-based grasp prediction models have become an industry standard for robotic bin-picking systems. To maximize pick success, production environments are often equipped with several end-effector tools that can be swapped on-the-fly, based on the target object. Tool-change, however, takes time. Choosing the order of grasps to perform, and corresponding tool-change actions, can improve system throughput; this is the topic of our work. The main challenge in planning tool change is uncertainty - we typically cannot see objects in the bin that are currently occluded. Inspired by queuing and admission control problems, we model the problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), where the goal is to maximize expected throughput, and we pursue an approximate solution based on model predictive control, where at each time step we plan based only on the currently visible objects. Special to our method is the idea of void zones, which are geometrical boundaries in which an unknown object will be present, and therefore cannot be accounted for during planning. Our planning problem can be solved using integer linear programming (ILP). However, we find that an approximate solution based on sparse tree search yields near optimal performance at a fraction of the time. Another question that we explore is how to measure the performance of tool-change planning: we find that throughput alone can fail to capture delicate and smooth behavior, and propose a principled alternative. Finally, we demonstrate our algorithms on both synthetic and real world bin picking tasks.

Recovering full 3D shapes from partial observations is a challenging task that has been extensively addressed in the computer vision community. Many deep learning methods tackle this problem by training 3D shape generation networks to learn a prior over the full 3D shapes. In this training regime, the methods expect the inputs to be in a fixed canonical form, without which they fail to learn a valid prior over the 3D shapes. We propose SCARP, a model that performs Shape Completion in ARbitrary Poses. Given a partial pointcloud of an object, SCARP learns a disentangled feature representation of pose and shape by relying on rotationally equivariant pose features and geometric shape features trained using a multi-tasking objective. Unlike existing methods that depend on an external canonicalization, SCARP performs canonicalization, pose estimation, and shape completion in a single network, improving the performance by 45% over the existing baselines. In this work, we use SCARP for improving grasp proposals on tabletop objects. By completing partial tabletop objects directly in their observed poses, SCARP enables a SOTA grasp proposal network improve their proposals by 71.2% on partial shapes. Project page: https://bipashasen.github.io/scarp

Picking up transparent objects is still a challenging task for robots. The visual properties of transparent objects such as reflection and refraction make the current grasping methods that rely on camera sensing fail to detect and localise them. However, humans can handle the transparent object well by first observing its coarse profile and then poking an area of interest to get a fine profile for grasping. Inspired by this, we propose a novel framework of vision-guided tactile poking for transparent objects grasping. In the proposed framework, a segmentation network is first used to predict the horizontal upper regions named as poking regions, where the robot can poke the object to obtain a good tactile reading while leading to minimal disturbance to the object's state. A poke is then performed with a high-resolution GelSight tactile sensor. Given the local profiles improved with the tactile reading, a heuristic grasp is planned for grasping the transparent object. To mitigate the limitations of real-world data collection and labelling for transparent objects, a large-scale realistic synthetic dataset was constructed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed segmentation network can predict the potential poking region with a high mean Average Precision (mAP) of 0.360, and the vision-guided tactile poking can enhance the grasping success rate significantly from 38.9% to 85.2%. Thanks to its simplicity, our proposed approach could also be adopted by other force or tactile sensors and could be used for grasping of other challenging objects. All the materials used in this paper are available at https://sites.google.com/view/tactilepoking.