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1. A Deep Learning-Based Autonomous Robot Manipulator for Sorting Application

   https://doi.org/DOI 10.1109/IRC.2020.00055  

   Bui, Hoang-Dung; Nguyen, Hai; La, Hung M; Li, Shuai (November 2020, 2020 Fourth IEEE International Conference on Robotic Computing)

   null (Ed.)

   bot manipulation and grasping mechanisms have received considerable attention in the recent past, leading to development of wide-range of industrial applications. This paper proposes the development of an autonomous robotic grasping system for object sorting application. RGB-D data is used by the robot for performing object detection, pose estimation, trajectory generation and object sorting tasks. The proposed approach can also handle grasping on certain objects chosen by users. Trained convolutional neural networks are used to perform object detection and determine the corresponding point cloud cluster of the object to be grasped. From the selected point cloud data, a grasp generator algorithm outputs potential grasps. A grasp filter then scores these potential grasps, and the highest-scored grasp will be chosen to execute on a real robot. A motion planner will generate collision-free trajectories to execute the chosen grasp. The experiments on AUBO robotic manipulator show the potentials of the proposed approach in the context of autonomous object sorting with robust and fast sorting performance. 

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2. Tri-modal thin-film flexible electronic skin to augment robotic grasping

   https://doi.org/10.1109/MEMSYS.2018.8346698  

   Yu, Caroline; Cavallari, Marco R.; Kymissis, Ioannis (January 2018, MEMS 2018)

   Robotic grasping is successful when a robot can sense and grasp an object without letting it slip. Beyond industrial robotic tasks, there are two main robotic grasping methods. The first is planning-based grasping where the object geometry is known beforehand and stable grasps are calculated using algorithms [1]. The second uses tactile feedback. Currently, there are capacitive sensors placed beneath stiff pads on the front of robotic fingers [2]. With post-execution grasp adjustment procedures to estimate grasp stability, a support vector machine classifier can distinguish stable and unstable grasps. The accuracy across the classes of tested objects is 81% [1]. We are proposing to improve the classifier's accuracy by wrapping flexible sensors around the robotic finger to gain information from the edges and sides of the finger. 

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3. Exploratory Grasping: Asymptotically Optimal Algorithms for Grasping Challenging Polyhedral Objects

   Danielczuk, Michael; Balakrishna, Ashwin; Brown, Daniel; Devgon, Shivin; Goldberg, Ken (January 2020, 4th Conference on Robot Learning)

   There has been significant recent work on data-driven algorithms for learning general-purpose grasping policies. However, these policies can consis- tently fail to grasp challenging objects which are significantly out of the distribution of objects in the training data or which have very few high quality grasps. Moti- vated by such objects, we propose a novel problem setting, Exploratory Grasping, for efficiently discovering reliable grasps on an unknown polyhedral object via sequential grasping, releasing, and toppling. We formalize Exploratory Grasping as a Markov Decision Process where we assume that the robot can (1) distinguish stable poses of a polyhedral object of unknown geometry, (2) generate grasp can- didates on these poses and execute them, (3) determine whether each grasp is successful, and (4) release the object into a random new pose after a grasp success or topple the object after a grasp failure. We study the theoretical complexity of Exploratory Grasping in the context of reinforcement learning and present an efficient bandit-style algorithm, Bandits for Online Rapid Grasp Exploration Strategy (BORGES), which leverages the structure of the problem to efficiently discover high performing grasps for each object stable pose. BORGES can be used to complement any general-purpose grasping algorithm with any grasp modality (parallel-jaw, suction, multi-fingered, etc) to learn policies for objects in which they exhibit persistent failures. Simulation experiments suggest that BORGES can significantly outperform both general-purpose grasping pipelines and two other online learning algorithms and achieves performance within 5% of the optimal policy within 1000 and 8000 timesteps on average across 46 challenging objects from the Dex-Net adversarial and EGAD! object datasets, respectively. Initial physical experiments suggest that BORGES can improve grasp success rate by 45% over a Dex-Net baseline with just 200 grasp attempts in the real world. See https://tinyurl.com/exp-grasping for supplementary material and videos. 

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4. The Grasp Reset Mechanism: An Automated Apparatus for Conducting Grasping Trials

   DuFrene, Kyle; Nave, Keegan; Campbell, Joshua; Balasubramanian, Ravi; Grimm, Cindy (May 2024, IEEE)

   Hasegawa, Yasuhisa (Ed.)

   Advancing robotic grasping and manipulation requires the ability to test algorithms and/or train learning models on large numbers of grasps. Towards the goal of more advanced grasping, we present the Grasp Reset Mechanism (GRM), a fully automated apparatus for conducting large-scale grasping trials. The GRM automates the process of resetting a grasping environment, repeatably placing an object in a fixed location and controllable 1-D orientation. It also collects data and swaps between multiple objects enabling robust dataset collection with no human intervention. We also present a standardized state machine interface for control, which allows for integration of most manipulators with minimal effort. In addition to the physical design and corresponding software, we include a dataset of 1,020 grasps. The grasps were created with a Kinova Gen3 robot arm and Robotiq 2F-85 Adaptive Gripper to enable training of learning models and to demonstrate the capabilities of the GRM. The dataset includes ranges of grasps conducted across four objects and a variety of orientations. Manipulator states, object pose, video, and grasp success data are provided for every trial. 

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5. Learning Diverse and Physically Feasible Dexterous Grasps with Generative Model and Bilevel Optimization

   A. Wu; M. Guo; C. K. Liu (January 2022, Conference on Robot Learning / Proceedings of Machine Learning Research)

   To fully utilize the versatility of a multi-fingered dexterous robotic hand for executing diverse object grasps, one must consider the rich physical constraints introduced by hand-object interaction and object geometry. We propose an integrative approach of combining a generative model and a bilevel optimization (BO) to plan diverse grasp configurations on novel objects. First, a conditional variational autoencoder trained on merely six YCB objects predicts the finger placement directly from the object point cloud. The prediction is then used to seed a nonconvex BO that solves for a grasp configuration under collision, reachability, wrench closure, and friction constraints. Our method achieved an 86.7% success over 120 real world grasping trials on 20 household objects, including unseen and challenging geometries. Through quantitative empirical evaluations, we confirm that grasp configurations produced by our pipeline are indeed guaranteed to satisfy kinematic and dynamic constraints. A video summary of our results is available at youtu.be/9DTrImbN99I. 

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