Point Cloud Decomposition for Task-Oriented Grasping

Abstract

Accurate localization of graspable regions within a single object point cloud is critical to enable task-based robot grasps. State-of-the-art task-based robot grasp synthesis methods fit over-approximated 3D bounding boxes that, in some cases, fail to isolate graspable regions even if they exist. While deep learning or geometrical shape decomposition methods can offer improved approximations, they lack guarantees for the graspability of segmented regions, require prior knowledge of the object, and/or demand large annotated datasets for fine-tuning. In this paper, we overcome these limitations to introduce ITSI (Iterative Slicing). ITSI is a complete, taskoriented grasp synthesis approach that functions independently of object-specific knowledge. ITSI effectively segments multiple graspable regions that conform to the constraints of robot grippers, thereby enabling compatibility with any object a robot seeks to grasp and any robot gripper size. Our extensive realworld and simulation experiments on diverse object datasets demonstrate how ITSI dramatically increases the number of discoverable robot grasps by up to 44 % when compared to the state-of-the-art. We also expand ITSI's capabilities beyond task-based robot grasp synthesis to highlight its performance in human affordance segmentation, where our performance is comparable to fully supervised deep-learning based methods (in fact, we outperform them by 1 %).