Custom Grasping: A Region-Based Robotic Grasping Detection Method in Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems

Industrial Cyber Physical Systems can use data and information gained from across a variety of different environments to enable robots that are reconfigurable. Custom grasping is a basic operation a robot must be able to carry out for a given task, i.e., finding the best grasping point for emergent behaviors. However, environmental disturbance and limited data degrade the precision and speed of many tailored machine learning models on robot grasping detection. This paper proposes a region-based method to enable fast custom grasping through fewer RGB-D data. The grasping detection problem is simplified as a two-stage prediction problem. At the first stage, a robust grasp candidate generation strategy is proposed based on the Sobel operator. At the second stage, a region-based predictor is designed to locate the best grasping point-pair for an emergent task. The predictor is trained by a modified consistency based self-training method to realize semi-supervised learning. Experimental results show that the success rate of custom grasping of new emergent object can be increased by 3.4% on average using the proposed method. By introducing data augmentation strategies in training, the success rate is further increased by 9.2% on average. A robot is able to grasp new object with 91.5% success rate using less than 100 training samples. The number of training samples required for the proposed method is less than to 1% of which for the previous works. Note to Practitioners—This research was motivated by the problem of robot reconfigurability for various industrial automation processes and focuses mainly on the recognition of grasping point-pair of emergent object for different task. Existing approaches on robotic grasping detection are tailored to a given object and require expensive training with large amount of labeled data. This paper presents a region-based few shot learning approach that enables the robot to detect the best grasping point-pair autonomously and quickly. We show how to generate candidate point-pairs with image distortion and background disturbance. We then demonstrate how the best grasping point-pair can be located with much less training cost. Experiments suggest that this approach is feasible in robot automation for handling a class of objects. In future research, we will construct behavior learning module to enable evolving cyber-physical robotic system for more purposes.