RobotFingerPrint: Unified Gripper Coordinate Space for Multi-Gripper Grasp Synthesis and Transfer
This work addresses the challenge of multi-gripper grasp synthesis and transfer in robotics, offering a novel representation that facilitates cross-gripper compatibility, though it is incremental in improving existing grasp methods.
The paper tackles the problem of synthesizing and transferring grasps across different robot grippers by introducing a Unified Gripper Coordinate Space (UGCS) representation, which uses spherical coordinates to enable stable and diverse grasps for novel objects and unseen grippers, as demonstrated through extensive simulation and real-world experiments.
We introduce a novel grasp representation named the Unified Gripper Coordinate Space (UGCS) for grasp synthesis and grasp transfer. Our representation leverages spherical coordinates to create a shared coordinate space across different robot grippers, enabling it to synthesize and transfer grasps for both novel objects and previously unseen grippers. The strength of this representation lies in the ability to map palm and fingers of a gripper and the unified coordinate space. Grasp synthesis is formulated as predicting the unified spherical coordinates on object surface points via a conditional variational autoencoder. The predicted unified gripper coordinates establish exact correspondences between the gripper and object points, which is used to optimize grasp pose and joint values. Grasp transfer is facilitated through the point-to-point correspondence between any two (potentially unseen) grippers and solved via a similar optimization. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments showcase the efficacy of the unified grasp representation for grasp synthesis in generating stable and diverse grasps. Similarly, we showcase real-world grasp transfer from human demonstrations across different objects.