Stanford University

JOURNAL ARTICLE

Learning Task-Oriented Grasping for Tool Manipulation from Simulated Self-Supervision

Fei-Fei Li
Silvio Savarese
Kuan Fang
Yuke Zhu
Animesh Garg
Andrey Kurenkov

The International Journal of Robotics Research
August 29, 2019

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Tool manipulation is vital for facilitating robots to complete challenging task goals. It requires reasoning about the desired effect of the task and, thus, properly grasping and manipulating the tool to achieve the task. Most work in robotics has focused on task-agnostic grasping, which optimizes for only grasp robustness without considering the subsequent manipulation tasks. In this article, we propose the Task-Oriented Grasping Network (TOG-Net) to jointly optimize both task-oriented grasping of a tool and the manipulation policy for that tool. The training process of the model is based on large-scale simulated self-supervision with procedurally generated tool objects. We perform both simulated and real-world experiments on two tool-based manipulation tasks: sweeping and hammering. Our model achieves overall 71.1% task success rate for sweeping and 80.0% task success rate for hammering.

Stanford University