Learning to place objects onto flat surfaces in upright orientations

Rhys Newbury, Kerry He, Akansel Cosgun, Tom Drummond

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleResearchpeer-review

13 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

We study the problem of placing a grasped object on an empty flat surface in an upright orientation, such as placing a cup on its bottom rather than on its side. We aim to find the required object rotation such that when the gripper is opened after the object makes contact with the surface, the object would be stably placed in the upright orientation. We iteratively use two neural networks. At every iteration, we use a convolutional neural network to estimate the required object rotation, which is executed by the robot, and then a separate convolutional neural network to estimate the quality of a placement in its current orientation. Our approach places previously unseen objects in upright orientations with a success rate of 98.1% in free space and 90.3% with a simulated robotic arm, using a dataset of 50 everyday objects in simulation experiments. Real-world experiments were performed, which achieved an 88.0% success rate, which serves as a proof-of-concept for direct sim-to-real transfer.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)4377-4384
Number of pages8
JournalIEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
Volume6
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jul 2021

Keywords

  • Deep learning in grasping and manipulation
  • perception for grasping and manipulation

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