Learning-Based Slip Detection for Robotic Fruit Grasping and Manipulation under Leaf Interference.

Journal: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland)
Published Date:

Abstract

Robotic harvesting research has seen significant achievements in the past decade, with breakthroughs being made in machine vision, robot manipulation, autonomous navigation and mapping. However, the missing capability of obstacle handling during the grasping process has severely reduced harvest success rate and limited the overall performance of robotic harvesting. This work focuses on leaf interference caused slip detection and handling, where solutions to robotic grasping in an unstructured environment are proposed. Through analysis of the motion and force of fruit grasping under leaf interference, the connection between object slip caused by leaf interference and inadequate harvest performance is identified for the first time in the literature. A learning-based perception and manipulation method is proposed to detect slip that causes problematic grasps of objects, allowing the robot to implement timely reaction. Our results indicate that the proposed algorithm detects grasp slip with an accuracy of 94%. The proposed sensing-based manipulation demonstrated great potential in robotic fruit harvesting, and could be extended to other pick-place applications.

Authors

  • Hongyu Zhou
    Institute for AI in Medicine and Faculty of Medicine, Macau University of Science and Technology, Macau, China; National Clinical Research Center for Ocular Diseases, Eye Hospital, Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou, China.
  • Jinhui Xiao
    Laboratory of Motion Generation and Analysis, Faculty of Engineering, Monash University, Clayton, VIC 3800, Australia.
  • Hanwen Kang
    Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia.
  • Xing Wang
    Department of Neurosis and Psychosomatic Diseases, Huzhou Third Municipal Hospital, The Affiliated Hospital of Huzhou University, Huzhou, Zhejiang, China.
  • Wesley Au
    Laboratory of Motion Generation and Analysis, Faculty of Engineering, Monash University, Clayton, VIC 3800, Australia.
  • Chao Chen
    Department of Neonatology, Children's Hospital of Fudan University, National Children's Medical Center, Shanghai, China.