Rotation invariance has been an important topic in computer vision tasks. Ideally, robot grasp detection should be rotation-invariant. However, rotation-invariance in robotic grasp detection has been only recently studied by using rotation anchor box that are often time-consuming and unreliable for multiple objects. In this paper, we propose a rotation ensemble module (REM) for robotic grasp detection using convolutions that rotates network weights. Our proposed REM was able to outperform current state-of-the-art methods by achieving up to 99.2% (image-wise), 98.6% (object-wise) accuracies on the Cornell dataset with real-time computation (50 frames per second). Our proposed method was also able to yield reliable grasps for multiple objects and up to 93.8% success rate for the real-time robotic grasping task with a 4-axis robot arm for small novel objects that was significantly higher than the baseline methods by 11-56%.

Applications of deep neural network (DNN) based object and grasp detections could be expanded significantly when the network output is processed by a high-level reasoning over relationship of objects. Recently, robotic grasp detection and object detection with reasoning have been investigated using DNNs. There have been efforts to combine these multitasks using separate networks so that robots can deal with situations of grasping specific target objects in the cluttered, stacked, complex piles of novel objects from a single RGB-D camera. We propose a single multi-task DNN that yields accurate detections of objects, grasp position and relationship reasoning among objects. Our proposed methods yield state-of-the-art performance with the accuracy of 98.6% and 74.2% with the computation speed of 33 and 62 frame per second on VMRD and Cornell datasets, respectively. Our methods also yielded 95.3% grasp success rate for novel object grasping tasks with a 4-axis robot arm and 86.7% grasp success rate in cluttered novel objects with a humanoid robot.