Affordance detection for task-specific grasping using deep learning

Abstract

In this paper we utilize the notion of affordances to model relations between task, object and a grasp to address the problem of task-specific robotic grasping. We use convolutional neural networks for encoding and detecting object affordances, class and orientation, which we utilize to formulate grasp constraints. Our approach applies to previously unseen objects from a fixed set of classes and facilitates reasoning about which tasks an object affords and how to grasp it for that task. We evaluate affordance detection on full-view and partial-view synthetic data and compute task-specific grasps for objects that belong to ten different classes and afford five different tasks. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by employing an optimization-based grasp planner to compute task-specific grasps.