VGQ-CNN: Moving Beyond Fixed Cameras and Top-Grasps for Grasp Quality Prediction

• Published in: 2022 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) pp. 1 - 8
• Main Authors: Konrad, Anna, McDonald, John, Villing, Rudi
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 18-07-2022
• Subjects: 6-DOF grasps; CNN; flexible; grasp quality; grasping; machine learning; mobile robot; robotics
• ISSN: 2161-4407
• DOI: 10.1109/IJCNN55064.2022.9892763

We present the Versatile Grasp Quality Convolutional Neural Network (VGQ-CNN), a grasp quality prediction network for 6-DOF grasps. VGQ-CNN can be used when evaluating grasps for objects seen from a wide range of camera poses or mobile robots without the need to retrain the network. By defining the grasp orientation explicitly as an input to the network, VGQ-CNN can evaluate 6-DOF grasp poses, moving beyond the 4-DOF grasps used in most image-based grasp evaluation methods like GQ-CNN. To train VGQ-CNN, we generate the new Versatile Grasp dataset (VG-dset) containing 6-DOF grasps observed from a wide range of camera poses. VGQ-CNN achieves a balanced accuracy of 82.1% on our test-split while generalising to a variety of camera poses. Meanwhile, it achieves competitive performance for overhead cameras and top-grasps with a balanced accuracy of 74.2% compared to GQ-CNN's 76.6%. We also propose a modified network architecture, Fast-VGQ-CNN, that speeds up inference using a shared encoder architecture and can make 128 grasp quality predictions in 12ms on a CPU. Code and data are available at https://aucoroboticsmu.github.io/vgq-cnn/.