Unknown Object Grasping for Assistive Robotics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a shared control pipeline for grasping unknown objects in assistive robotics, combining user guidance with physics-based planning to improve grasp success rates and adaptability in cluttered environments.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach integrating user input, 3D reconstruction, and physics-based grasp planning for unknown object grasping in assistive robotics.

Findings

87% grasp success rate on 10 objects

Effective grasping in cluttered and shelf environments

Combines user guidance with automated planning

Abstract

We propose a novel pipeline for unknown object grasping in shared robotic autonomy scenarios. State-of-the-art methods for fully autonomous scenarios are typically learning-based approaches optimised for a specific end-effector, that generate grasp poses directly from sensor input. In the domain of assistive robotics, we seek instead to utilise the user's cognitive abilities for enhanced satisfaction, grasping performance, and alignment with their high level task-specific goals. Given a pair of stereo images, we perform unknown object instance segmentation and generate a 3D reconstruction of the object of interest. In shared control, the user then guides the robot end-effector across a virtual hemisphere centered around the object to their desired approach direction. A physics-based grasp planner finds the most stable local grasp on the reconstruction, and finally the user is guided by shared control to this grasp. In experiments on the DLR EDAN platform, we report a grasp success rate of 87% for 10 unknown objects, and demonstrate the method's capability to grasp objects in structured clutter and from shelves.