SuperQ-GRASP: Superquadrics-based Grasp Pose Estimation on Larger Objects for Mobile-Manipulation

TL;DR

This paper introduces SuperQ-GRASP, a geometric approach that uses superquadrics derived from implicit object models to estimate grasp poses on larger objects, overcoming data incompleteness and size limitations.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel method combining NeRF-based object modeling with superquadrics for grasp estimation, enhancing generalization to large objects and incomplete sensor data.

Findings

Effective grasp estimation on larger objects.

Robustness to noisy and incomplete sensor data.

Generalization across diverse object sizes.

Abstract

Grasp planning and estimation have been a longstanding research problem in robotics, with two main approaches to find graspable poses on the objects: 1) geometric approach, which relies on 3D models of objects and the gripper to estimate valid grasp poses, and 2) data-driven, learning-based approach, with models trained to identify grasp poses from raw sensor observations. The latter assumes comprehensive geometric coverage during the training phase. However, the data-driven approach is typically biased toward tabletop scenarios and struggle to generalize to out-of-distribution scenarios with larger objects (e.g. chair). Additionally, raw sensor data (e.g. RGB-D data) from a single view of these larger objects is often incomplete and necessitates additional observations. In this paper, we take a geometric approach, leveraging advancements in object modeling (e.g. NeRF) to build an implicit model by taking RGB images from views around the target object. This model enables the extraction of explicit mesh model while also capturing the visual appearance from novel viewpoints that is useful for perception tasks like object detection and pose estimation. We further decompose the NeRF-reconstructed 3D mesh into superquadrics (SQs) -- parametric geometric primitives, each mapped to a set of precomputed grasp poses, allowing grasp composition on the target object based on these primitives. Our proposed pipeline overcomes the problems: a) noisy depth and incomplete view of the object, with a modeling step, and b) generalization to objects of any size. For more qualitative results, refer to the supplementary video and webpage https://bit.ly/3ZrOanU