Shirin Joshi

Shivin Devgon, Jeffrey Ichnowski, Michael Danielczuk et al.

In industrial part kitting, 3D objects are inserted into cavities for transportation or subsequent assembly. Kitting is a critical step as it can decrease downstream processing and handling times and enable lower storage and shipping costs. We present Kit-Net, a framework for kitting previously unseen 3D objects into cavities given depth images of both the target cavity and an object held by a gripper in an unknown initial orientation. Kit-Net uses self-supervised deep learning and data augmentation to train a convolutional neural network (CNN) to robustly estimate 3D rotations between objects and matching concave or convex cavities using a large training dataset of simulated depth images pairs. Kit-Net then uses the trained CNN to implement a controller to orient and position novel objects for insertion into novel prismatic and conformal 3D cavities. Experiments in simulation suggest that Kit-Net can orient objects to have a 98.9% average intersection volume between the object mesh and that of the target cavity. Physical experiments with industrial objects succeed in 18% of trials using a baseline method and in 63% of trials with Kit-Net. Video, code, and data are available at https://github.com/BerkeleyAutomation/Kit-Net.

Shirin Joshi, Sulabh Kumra, Ferat Sahin

In this work, we present a deep reinforcement learning based method to solve the problem of robotic grasping using visio-motor feedback. The use of a deep learning based approach reduces the complexity caused by the use of hand-designed features. Our method uses an off-policy reinforcement learning framework to learn the grasping policy. We use the double deep Q-learning framework along with a novel Grasp-Q-Network to output grasp probabilities used to learn grasps that maximize the pick success. We propose a visual servoing mechanism that uses a multi-view camera setup that observes the scene which contains the objects of interest. We performed experiments using a Baxter Gazebo simulated environment as well as on the actual robot. The results show that our proposed method outperforms the baseline Q-learning framework and increases grasping accuracy by adapting a multi-view model in comparison to a single-view model.