Deep vision networks for real-time robotic grasp detection

Grasping has always been a great challenge for robots due to its lack of the ability to well understand the perceived sensing data. In this work, we propose an end-to-end deep vision network model to predict possible good grasps from real-world images in real time. In order to accelerate the speed of the grasp detection, reference rectangles are designed to suggest potential grasp locations and then refined to indicate robotic grasps in the image. With the proposed model, the graspable scores for each location in the image and the corresponding predicted grasp rectangles can be obtained in real time at a rate of 80 frames per second on a graphic processing unit. The model is evaluated on a real robot-collected data set and different reference rectangle settings are compared to yield the best detection performance. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can assist the robot to learn the graspable part of the object from the image in a fast manner.