Learning ambidextrous robot grasping policies

Universal picking (UP), or reliable robot grasping of a diverse range of novel objects from heaps, is a grand challenge for e-commerce order fulfillment, manufacturing, inspection, and home service robots. Optimizing the rate, reliability, and range of UP is difficult due to inherent uncertainty in sensing, control, and contact physics. This paper explores "ambidextrous" robot grasping, where two or more heterogeneous grippers are used. We present Dexterity Network (Dex-Net) 4.0, a substantial extension to previous versions of Dex-Net that learns policies for a given set of grippers by training on synthetic datasets using domain randomization with analytic models of physics and geometry. We train policies for…

• NS
  National Science Foundation

  Award: 1734633
• AS
  American Society for Engineering Education