In this work, we focus on multi-step manipulation tasks that involve long-horizon planning and considers progress reversal. Such tasks interlace high-level reasoning that consists of the expected states that can be attained to achieve an overall task and low-level reasoning that decides what actions will yield these states. We propose a sample efficient Previous Action Conditioned Robotic Manipulation Network (PAC-RoManNet) to learn the action-value functions and predict manipulation action candidates from visual observation of the scene and action-value predictions of the previous action. We define a Task Progress based Gaussian (TPG) reward function that computes the reward based on actions that lead to successful motion primitives and progress towards the overall task goal. To balance the ratio of exploration/exploitation, we introduce a Loss Adjusted Exploration (LAE) policy that determines actions from the action candidates according to the Boltzmann distribution of loss estimates. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by training PAC-RoManNet to learn several challenging multi-step robotic manipulation tasks in both simulation and real-world. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the existing methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of success rate and action efficiency. The ablation studies show that TPG and LAE are especially beneficial for tasks like multiple block stacking. Additional experiments on Ravens-10 benchmark tasks suggest good generalizability of the proposed PAC-RoManNet.

In this paper, we present a modular robotic system to tackle the problem of generating and performing antipodal robotic grasps for unknown objects from the n-channel image of the scene. We propose a novel Generative Residual Convolutional Neural Network (GR-ConvNet) model that can generate robust antipodal grasps from n-channel input at real-time speeds (~20ms). We evaluate the proposed model architecture on standard datasets and a diverse set of household objects. We achieved state-of-the-art accuracy of 97.7% and 94.6% on Cornell and Jacquard grasping datasets, respectively. We also demonstrate a grasp success rate of 95.4% and 93% on household and adversarial objects, respectively, using a 7 DoF robotic arm.

Deep learning has significantly advanced computer vision and natural language processing. While there have been some successes in robotics using deep learning, it has not been widely adopted. In this paper, we present a novel robotic grasp detection system that predicts the best grasping pose of a parallel-plate robotic gripper for novel objects using the RGB-D image of the scene. The proposed model uses a deep convolutional neural network to extract features from the scene and then uses a shallow convolutional neural network to predict the grasp configuration for the object of interest. Our multi-modal model achieved an accuracy of 89.21% on the standard Cornell Grasp Dataset and runs at real-time speeds. This redefines the state-of-the-art for robotic grasp detection.