Task-Specific Grasp Planning for Robotic Assembly by Fine-Tuning GQCNNs on Automatically Generated Synthetic Data

In modern robot applications, there is often a need to manipulate previously unknown objects in an unstructured environment. The field of grasp-planning deals with the task of finding grasps for a given object that can be successfully executed with a robot. The predicted grasps can be evaluated according to certain criteria, such as analytical metrics, similarity to human-provided grasps, or the success rate of physical trials. The quality of a grasp also depends on the task which will be carried out after the grasping is completed. Current task-specific grasp planning approaches mostly use probabilistic methods, which utilize categorical task encoding. We argue that categorical task encoding may not be suitable for complex assembly tasks. This paper proposes a transfer-learning-based approach for task-specific grasp planning for robotic assembly. The proposed method is based on an automated pipeline that quickly and automatically generates a small-scale task-specific synthetic grasp dataset using Graspit! and Blender. This dataset is utilized to fine-tune pre-trained grasp quality convolutional neural networks (GQCNNs). The aim is to train GQCNNs that can predict grasps which do not result in a collision when placing the objects. Consequently, this paper focuses on the geometric feasibility of the predicted grasps and does not consider the dynamic effects. The fine-tuned GQCNNs are evaluated using the Moveit! Task Constructor motion planning framework, which enables the automated inspection of whether the motion planning for a task is feasible given a predicted grasp and, if not, which part of the task is responsible for the failure. Our results suggest that fine-tuning GQCNN models can result in superior grasp-planning performance (0.9 success rate compared to 0.65) in the context of an assembly task. Our method can be used to rapidly attain new task-specific grasp policies for flexible robotic assembly applications.