Category-Association Based Similarity Matching for Novel Object Pick-and-Place Task

TL;DR

This paper presents a similarity matching approach based on category associations and semantic word embeddings to improve robotic pick-and-place tasks, especially for novel objects, achieving high success rates and better generalization.

Contribution

It introduces a novel similarity matching method using category semantics and a grasp planning strategy that enhances generalization for novel objects in robotic pick-and-place tasks.

Findings

Achieved an average success rate of 90.6% for in-category objects.

Achieved an average success rate of 75.9% for out-of-category objects.

Validated the method's effectiveness through real-world experiments.

Abstract

Robotic pick-and-place has been researched for a long time to cope with uncertainty of novel objects and changeable environments. Past works mainly focus on learning-based methods to achieve high precision. However, they have difficulty being generalized for the limitation of specified training models. To break through this drawback of learning-based approaches, we introduce a new perspective of similarity matching between novel objects and a known database based on category-association to achieve pick-and-place tasks with high accuracy and stabilization. We calculate the category name similarity using word embedding to quantify the semantic similarity between the categories of known models and the target real-world objects. With a similar model identified by a similarity prediction function, we preplan a series of robust grasps and imitate them to plan new grasps on the real-world target object. We also propose a distance-based method to infer the in-hand posture of objects and adjust small rotations to achieve stable placements under uncertainty. Through a real-world robotic pick-and-place experiment with a dozen of in-category and out-of-category novel objects, our method achieved an average success rate of 90.6% and 75.9% respectively, validating the capacity of generalization to diverse objects.