Communication-Efficient Module-Wise Federated Learning for Grasp Pose Detection in Cluttered Environments
This work addresses communication efficiency for resource-constrained robots in decentralized grasp pose detection, representing an incremental improvement over existing federated learning methods.
The paper tackles the communication overhead problem in federated learning for grasp pose detection by proposing a module-wise framework that allocates more communication to slower-converging modules, achieving higher accuracy for a given communication budget and superior grasp success rates in real-world cluttered scenes.
Grasp pose detection (GPD) is a fundamental capability for robotic autonomy, but its reliance on large, diverse datasets creates significant data privacy and centralization challenges. Federated Learning (FL) offers a privacy-preserving solution, but its application to GPD is hindered by the substantial communication overhead of large models, a key issue for resource-constrained robots. To address this, we propose a novel module-wise FL framework that begins by analyzing the learning dynamics of the GPD model's functional components. This analysis identifies slower-converging modules, to which our framework then allocates additional communication effort. This is realized through a two-phase process: a standard full-model training phase is followed by a communication-efficient phase where only the identified subset of slower-converging modules is trained and their partial updates are aggregated. Extensive experiments on the GraspNet-1B dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms standard FedAvg and other baselines, achieving higher accuracy for a given communication budget. Furthermore, real-world experiments on a physical robot validate our approach, showing a superior grasp success rate compared to baseline methods in cluttered scenes. Our work presents a communication-efficient framework for training robust, generalized GPD models in a decentralized manner, effectively improving the trade-off between communication cost and model performance.